Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

I almost managed to as well. I started to turn away, to think about something else.

And then he said it. The one thing that was always going to tip me over the edge. He said that he was looking forward to fucking my daughter some day soon.

My beautiful little daughter, who was three years old.

I snapped. The strange thing was that, as he said it, the vision that came into my head wasn’t of my daughter. It was of a young squaddie called Max, who got hit by an IED in Helmand on my first tour there. He was ripped to shreds, left with half an arm and no legs, and he ended up stuck in a council flat ignored by the army and the government and the council and everyone, while this piece of shit — this dirty fucking piece of shit who’d never done a day’s work in his life, who’d never done anything to help anyone else ever — got to deal crack, torture young women, and threaten police officers, all with total impunity.

So I went for him. Hard. His lawyer tried to stop me but I broke the slimy bastard’s nose with one punch. Webber was off like a shot, but his jeans were hanging halfway down his arse and he was wearing these huge trainers that looked like they weighed more than him, so he was never going to get away. I jumped on his back and drove him face first into the pavement. I had his head in my hands and I kept slamming it down on the concrete. The blood was splattering everywhere. Jesus, it was a sweet feeling. I would have killed him, no question. It never even occurred to me to stop. I would have smashed his head into pieces and stamped on the remains, but thankfully I never got the chance. There were a lot of people in the vicinity, including cops and security guards, and eventually they managed to pull me off him. But I was still lashing out. One of the court security guards got an elbow in the face that knocked out two of his teeth, and the cop I was with ended up with a busted cheekbone.

I was arrested on the spot. There was no way of avoiding it really. Alfonse Webber was hurt pretty bad. He was in hospital for a week and had to have extensive plastic surgery to repair the damage to his face. I was suspended immediately and charged with grievous bodily harm. When I appeared in court two days later, I was remanded in custody. Even though it was my first offence, even though I was a decorated war hero, even though a psychiatrist who interviewed me subsequently concluded I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, even though Alfonse Webber was a violent lowlife who’d gone out of his way to provoke me … Even after all those things I was looking at a three- or four-year stretch minimum.

And then someone offered me a deal.

We drove through the back streets of north London, passing through Edmonton and then Enfield, and all the time Cecil kept checking his rearview mirror to make sure we weren’t being followed — although I had no idea who might be following us. If it was the cops, they would have arrested us on the spot, seeing that Cecil had just killed a man. But I kept quiet and let him get on with it.

The continuous swathes of clogged-up London suburbs eventually gave way to identikit executive housing communities, golf courses, and the first hints of the green belt, and then when we were only just the other side of the M25, Cecil pulled into a quiet country lane and stopped twenty yards short of an abandoned-looking barn nestling on the edge of a small beech wood.

‘This is a bit of an out-of-the-way place to meet someone, isn’t it?’ I said, looking round.

‘You can never be too careful,’ said Cecil, reaching over and pulling a mobile phone-shaped electronic device with an antenna on the end from the glove compartment. When he switched it on, a red light appeared on the side.

‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked, knowing full well what it was.

‘It’s a bug finder. If you’re wearing a wire, it’ll pick it up.’

‘It might have escaped your notice, Cecil, but we’ve just committed an armed robbery together, so I’m hardly likely to be setting you up.’

‘The man we’re meeting’s paranoid. And orders are orders.’

I let him do the honours, knowing there was no point arguing. The machine didn’t beep.

‘You want to search me as well?’

Credit to Cecil, at least he had the dignity to look embarrassed as he got out of the car after grabbing the holdall with the money from the back seat. ‘Come on.’

I followed him up the track towards the barn. The air was cold and fresh, and the sun was just managing to fight its way through the cloud cover. The constant stream of traffic from the M25 was no longer audible, and the only sound among the trees, and the fields beyond them, was the occasional shriek of a crow. There were no other cars around, which meant that the man we’d come to see hadn’t arrived yet, or he was keeping a very low profile.

It struck me then that this would be an ideal place to kill someone.

We stopped outside the barn. One side of it was open to the elements and it was empty inside bar a cluster of rusty oil drums and some ancient farm machinery.

‘Where’s the guy we’re here to meet?’ I asked, rubbing my hands together against the cold.

‘Here,’ came a voice behind us.

I turned round and saw a figure in a long coat emerge from the outbuilding behind us, from where he’d clearly been watching our approach, and walk over to us. Even though he was dressed casually, he was wearing an expensive-looking pair of leather driving gloves.

‘Sir, this is Jones, the man I was telling you about.’ Although he tried to hide it, Cecil’s tone was deferential.

The man who stopped in front of me was a mass of physical contradictions. On the one hand he was tall, lean and fit-looking, with the classic bearing of an ex-army officer, but on the other, his complexion was pale to the point of illness, and he had a prominent vein running down one side of his face like a worm beneath the skin, which I had difficulty taking my eyes off.

‘Mr Jones, pleased to meet you.’

‘Jones is fine on its own,’ I said. ‘And you are?’

‘My name’s Cain,’ he said, his voice surprisingly deep and sonorous. ‘Cecil’s been telling me about what happened to you. That you were sent down because you doled out some real justice to someone who deserved it. That’s this country all over.’

‘It hasn’t done me any favours.’

‘It hasn’t done any of us any favours.’ He looked at me sharply, and I thought I saw the vein move beneath his skin. ‘You were lucky you only got sent down for a year.’

That was my weak point. The length of sentence. ‘It was long enough,’ I told him. ‘Especially for an ex-cop. I wasn’t the most popular man on the block.’

‘I can believe it.’ He gestured towards the holdall Cecil was holding. ‘How much did we make?’

‘We haven’t counted it yet,’ said Cecil, ‘but it feels like a lot.’ He handed it to Cain who motioned for us to follow him into the barn.

Inside, Cain put the holdall down on one of the oil drums and opened it up, revealing a whole heap of cash. He immediately started to count it out, placing each individual wad on one of the other drums. I’m not a greedy man but I felt a slither of excitement as I stared at it. Apparently, LeShawn always insisted that the money was counted before he arrived to pick it up, and it had been divided into single-denomination five-grand wads.

‘What happened out there?’ asked Cain as he carried on counting. I was counting too and I’d already got to ninety grand.

‘LeShawn didn’t want to play ball,’ said Cecil. ‘He went for Jones’s gun. We had to shoot him.’

‘Who pulled the trigger?’

‘I did.’

‘How come you didn’t shoot him, Jones?’