Robert Young - Gatecrasher

Suddenly a car swept noisily past them down the road and drew to a sudden halt up ahead, the tires squealing on the road. Tyler was sharply awake and trying to take things in as he sat up in the seat.

‘What the fuck is this?’ hissed Drennan as he sat forward and grabbed for the ignition.

Up ahead the driver side door of the car swung open and a tall, solid figure stepped out and jogged around to the rear door on the other side, pulling it open.

From the gap in the hedge in front of Campbell’s flat several figures emerged, a man and a woman in front as far as Drennan could see, both being manhandled by another two figures who pushed them roughly toward the open door.

As they bent toward the car the light from inside lit their faces briefly.

‘Shit. That’s him.’ said Drennan.

‘Yeah, but who the fuck are the rest of them?’

The driver had leapt back into the car and as one of the other two figures followed Campbell and Sarah into the back seat and the other man took the front, the car roared to life and sped away.

‘I think we ought to find out,’ said Drennan starting the car and pulling out after them.

Tuesday. 1.15am.

Gresham had not been lying about his kidnapped daughter and the evidence was sitting in front of him now looking tired, scared and unkempt, like she hadn’t slept or eaten or washed in days.

Even so he recognised her.

Campbell’s eyes met with hers and through the fear in her expression he could see defiance too, a strength that Campbell did not feel he could match. He was terrified.

He and Sarah were both standing, hands bound, in a small room lit with a naked lightbulb. The snot green paint on the walls was flaking and stained and a pair of long navy curtains hung loosely in the window.

In front of them stood a tall, slender man with short dark hair swept sharply across his scalp and parted at the side with almost geometric precision. His nose was thin and pointed and his eyes were small and intense as he stared at them drawing deeply on a cigarette. Nobody spoke.

On the floor in the corner sat the girl that Campbell had last seen pleading with him on his doorstep to let her in so she could get rid of the man that had started following her. A lie of course, which had led to Slater bustling through the door and dragging him off to meet Gresham.

This was Angie then.

Slowly and with a menacing assurance the tall man straightened up from where he had been resting against the wall and walked towards Campbell, stopping only when he was inches away from him and he could feel the heat of the burning cigarette near his face. The smoke wafted into his eyes and his eyelids instinctively blinked it away.

And this must be the very unpleasant man George had told him about. Frank Walker.

‘I won’t insult anybody,’ started the man looking from Campbell to Sarah where his gaze lingered, ‘by pretending that we don’t all know what this is about.'

Campbell tried not to break eye contact, failed.

‘Angela tells me that you have something worth a lot of money my friend,’ he continued as his eyes drifted back to Campbell and fixed on him. ‘You are going to give it to me.’

Christ, thought Campbell, who the hell else knows about this now?

Walker continued to stare into his eyes and slowly lifted the cigarette from his mouth, exhaled through his nose and then replaced it.

Leaving it hanging in his lips he calmly stepped to the side and took Sarah’s arm, drawing her across the room with him away from Campbell whose eyes went wide as yet more fear fizzed through his body.

Spinning her around so she faced Campbell, Walker slipped a hand around her waist and drew her close to him, resting his chin on his shoulder and allowing Campbell to watch his gaze wander down over her body. Sarah froze and stared imploringly at Campbell, tears beginning to well in her eyes.

The hand at her waist began to creep up over her midriff toward her chest and Walker looked up again at Campbell with a smirk full of malevolence. As his hand moved closer to her breasts she squirmed suddenly and tried to pull away but this only made Walker grin more broadly and he clamped his arms around her ribs and shoulders and held her to him, his cheek pressed against hers.

Campbell made only the slightest of movements toward them, with no clear thought of what he might do. In a second he had dropped to his knees as a solid fist slammed into his kidneys from behind and his vision blurred as he winced in agony.

‘I could make this clearer for you,’ came that voice again. Sarah began to cry at the sight of him on his knees, ‘But I don’t think that’s necessary.’

As he knelt there, the pain shooting up through his abdomen he blinked tears from his eyes and tried to fight off a tangible feeling of panic. Not when bound and beaten in Gresham’s filthy lock-up, nor when Slater had chased him or even when the mystery caller at the cottage had run them down along the cliff-top had Campbell felt this scared. The situation had never been so completely out of his control until now.

The stakes had been raised once more and he was way out of his depth. Again, Sarah was at risk and Campbell could do nothing to help her this time. He felt his resolve crumbling fast and he knew he wanted out. Now. He had been foolish to think that he could win this game, foolish to think that he could even play it.

As he looked up again the tall thin man called Walker was in front of him and Sarah had slid down the wall and was crouched now next to Gresham’s daughter who had watched the entire scene in silence. He caught her eye and she looked almost apologetic for a moment.

‘Now then,’ said Walker and suddenly huge hands had wrapped painfully around Campbell’s bruised chest from above and he was dragged roughly to his feet. ‘Go with the boys, waste precisely none of my time trying to fuck me about and then bring me back what I want.’

He turned theatrically to look at the two frightened young women cowering on the floor behind him. ‘Do be quick though. I’ll have to find something to do if I get too bored.’

Tuesday. 1.20am.

It wasn’t quite clear what was happening here but it was obvious that Campbell was the key to it. Who then, were these others? As far as Drennan was concerned it was only Gresham and his motley crew that ought to even know who Campbell was, let alone be carting him off in the middle of the night.

So what was going on?

Drennan had been chewing this over for a few minutes since having parked the car further along the street and watched the group in the other car empty out and enter a run-down looking terraced house. Gresham had been sitting on the memory stick since the fiasco of the break in at Griffin. Then they had screwed up knocking off Cooper as he’d told them to but that had somehow panned out OK when he’d died in a west London hospital.

Neither Drennan nor his boss thought that Cooper would have been able to say too much to Campbell, who had got himself involved in something he couldn’t possibly understand. But Gresham’s lot had seemed as if they were going to tidy that up for them anyway, which meant that Drennan, Tyler and their boss could stay nice and anonymous. Of course as time passed and there were no results his boss had grown increasingly nervous.

Drennan could only imagine that perhaps Campbell himself had involved others and got himself further into trouble. He had certainly proved unpredictable so far and everybody had underestimated him, Drennan and his paymaster included. The other option made Drennan more nervous.

That Gresham had involved someone else.

Because if that was true, it could only mean one of two things; either Gresham was trying to sell the stick to a higher bidder. Or he didn’t actually have it. Otherwise, why would somebody else be after Campbell?