Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

A quick squeeze and a tiny jet of clear liquid arced into the night.

‘Please, it was an accident, I didn’t-’

‘BRAND NEW PORSCHE NINE-ELEVEN AND YOU- ulk…’

I wrapped an arm around his throat and rammed the needle into the side of his neck, just below the ear. Squeezed the plunger down. Jammed my right knee into the small of his back and pulled him towards me — leaning against the Jag. Holding him up as his hands flapped, fingers scrabbling at the syringe.

Getting weaker.

And weaker.

And then his arms went limp, his knees sagged, head fell forwards.

‘Open the back door.’

Alice wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Ash, this isn’t-’

‘All you’ve got to do is get the door, no one’s going to see.’ Not with the car between us and them.

She scurried forward and pulled the Jaguar’s back door open.

I turned and tipped Manson in, so he was slumped in the footwell behind the seats. Shoved his knees up so his feet didn’t stick out. Took the tartan blanket from the back seat and draped it over him. Clunked the door shut.

‘Snug as a bug.’ Even standing right next to the car and staring down between the front and back seats, you’d never know he was there.

I waited for a break in the traffic, then limped across the road to the Porsche, pulled out the sticker I’d liberated from the traffic office and plastered it across the windscreen: ‘POLICE AWARE’. The thing could stay there for weeks now and all anyone would do is moan about what a lazy bunch of sods Oldcastle plod were.

Plan A was back on track again.

Alice shifted from foot to foot, peering back towards the Jaguar. Her voice was little more than a hiss. ‘Is he dead?’

I clicked the bolt cutters through another wire diamond in the chain-link fence. ‘Drink your tea.’

Rain drummed on the skin of her umbrella. The droplets caught the streetlight’s glow and sparked like fireworks. On the other side of the car park, Parson’s Bargain Cash-and-Carry squatted in all its corrugated steel glory — two of the neon letters in the sign flickered on the brink of death, three more already there. A couple of oversized shopping-trolleys lay abandoned on the wet tarmac, next to the catering van where we’d got two teas, a Kit Kat and a caramel wafer.

Debris clung to the chain-link in patches. Escaped carrier bags. Crisp packets. Ruptured newspapers, spewing their stories on damp grey wings.

She took a sip from the polystyrene cup and grimaced. ‘Are you sure this is a-’

‘Positive.’ Click . ‘And he’s not dead, he’s just resting. According to Noel, our friend Mr Manson’s going to be unconscious for about another three hours.’ And even if he did wake up before that, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Click .

And finished.

Had to admit, it was a pretty decent job — an escape hatch snipped into the chain-link, just big enough for a small person to squeeze through. A little shoogling and the gap was barely visible.

A rectangular building lurked on the other side of the fence, the signage visible through the barbed wire looped around the top: ‘LUMLEY amp; SON — CHANDLERS EST. 1946’. The yard was empty, the building streaked with rust, all the windows on the ground floor boarded up with plywood. No lights, just silhouettes and shadows.

Alice stood on her tiptoes and peered. ‘I don’t like it. It looks creepy.’

‘That’ll be why Mrs Kerrigan picked it. Somewhere nice and atmospheric to hand over a dead mob accountant.’ I took out a couple of carrier-bags and tied them to the chain-link in the middle of the hatch. Marking it.

I straightened up, popped the Jaguar’s boot open.

Paul Manson lay on his side, in a little nest of blue tarpaulin. I’d invested a whole roll of silver duct-tape in securing his ankles together, then his knees, and then both wrists behind his back. The length of washing line was looped around his throat, the other end tied to his bound ankles — struggle and he’d garrotte himself.

OK, so the gag was a bit of a risk. If he reacted badly to the anaesthetic he’d choke on his own vomit, but … tough. If he didn’t want to end up like this he shouldn’t have gone into business laundering money for gangsters.

The tarpaulin scrunched and rustled as I folded one edge back and slipped the bolt cutters in with the rest of the stuff we’d bought at B amp;Q — well, it wasn’t as if Manson could get to it — then grabbed the lump hammer. Short wooden handle. Heavy head. Nice and sturdy.

Just right for caving someone’s skull in.

The boot lid clunked shut again.

I opened Alice’s satchel and slipped the hammer inside. ‘Right, here’s the rules. One: If someone’s chasing you, you twat them one. But only if they catch you, OK? No standing your ground or going on the offensive. If they’re chasing you: keep running.’

‘But-’

‘No buts. Rule two: you don’t stop.’ I pointed at the hatch in the fence. ‘You slip through here and you keep going. Because soon as you’re one hundred yards away, our ankle monitors go off and Jacobson’s SWAT team come steaming in with all guns blazing. That’s our security blanket.’

She pulled a face, jerked forwards, as if a ghost had just slapped her backside. Then pulled her phone out of her back pocket. It buzzed in her hand.

Mine did the same thing in my pocket. When I took it out, the words ‘DOWNLOADING UPDATE ~ 20 % COMPLETE’ flashed on the screen. Thirty percent. Forty percent…

‘Rule three: Mrs Kerrigan is dangerous. She’ll kill Shifty, she’ll kill you, she’ll kill me, and she won’t even flinch. I don’t care what she says, what she promises. You don’t trust her. You run.’

When it hit a hundred percent my phone bleeped — a text message.

1 app for ankl monitors, 1 filtered photo (×3). Still lookin fr pic match in systm.

No sign of Ur new m8 in HOMLES DB.

Yeah, he might whinge, but Sabir always came through.

‘Rule four: Paul Manson is scum. He’s got rich off the back of drugs, prostitution, violence, robbery, and murder. You don’t worry about him, you don’t feel guilty. Mrs Kerrigan is going to kill him whether we hand him over or not. He’s already dead.’

I checked the attached photographs. They were all versions of the picture Liz Thornton had texted when we went to see her this morning — the Camburn Creeper, caught in the car park outside the nurses’ halls. Sabir had cropped out the Fiat the man was standing next to, zooming in on the face.

In the first photo the features were slightly plastic, the skin tone rendered by algorithms and educated guesswork rather than nature. Wide forehead, round nose, bags under the eyes, long chin bisected by shadow. Photo number two took a different approach. The shadows under the woolly hat had turned into a pair of thick-rimmed hipster glasses, the nose thinner with a bend to one side, as if it’d been broken a couple of times. Photo three ditched the glasses, but swapped the shadow running from the bottom of the nose to the tip of the chin for a weird vertical soul-patch thing…

Back to number two. Then three. Then two again. Put them all together and… A smile broke across my face.

Alice shuffled over and stared at my phone. ‘What?’

The smile turned into a grin and I thumbed out a reply:

Sabir, no matter what anyone says, you are a sodding STAR!

‘What? What’s funny?’

I stabbed up the contacts menu and dialled Jacobson.

He answered with a sigh. ‘ If you’re calling looking to weasel out of the team meeting, you can- ’

‘Fancy arresting someone?’

Alice tugged at my sleeve. ‘Who are we arresting?’