Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

“What exactly do you mean?” Masterson said dumbly.

“All I mean is that before you get your revenge, let’s find out what his motives were.”

A new figure stepped forward from the darkness of the carriage. It was Dr Graham Pryce, his face bruised but his suit immaculate.

“I tend to agree with Philip,” he said. “I think you can overdo this motive business. This chap is very sick. What he did to me was appalling. What he did to my wife was worse. Of course, being sick doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be punished but I think it does mean that motivation might be rather thin on the ground.”

“Exactly,” Masterson said. “He’s just rubbish, the kind of thing that you find littering the street, like dog turds or McDonald’s wrappers. We should clear him up.”

“I think you’re being incredibly naive,” Sands insisted. “Do you really think he’s a one-man band? Do you think he woke up one morning and thought it would be fun to beat us up? Do you think he’s the prime mover, the Mr Big? Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just the muscle. I want to know who the brains are.”

The good doctor shrugged. He knew that in the end Sands would do what he liked.

“Why not ask him?” Pryce said.

It was a novel idea. Till then they had been talking about Mick as though they thought he wasn’t there, or as though he was too stupid to be able to follow their conversation.

“All right, I will,” Sands said.

The six men gathered close, stood around Mick, waiting eagerly to hear what was corning next.

Sands said to Mick, “I want you to answer some very simple questions. Why have you been doing this to us? Why this? Why us? And on whose instructions?”

Mick considered shouting obscene defiance but rejected the idea and said, “Nobody’s instructing me.” He said it under his breath, and as he said it, it finally struck him that these men really didn’t seem to know what they’d done. Could a gang-rape really mean so little to them? Could they have blanked it out so easily and completely? Were they really that callous? Could it never have crossed their minds that someone might want revenge?

They were not happy with his simple, straightforward answer. Masterson hit him again, punching him twice in the face and neck.

“Why?” Sands repeated.

There was a long silence as Mick appeared to struggle with himself, appeared to be considering whether or not to make a clean breast of it.

At last he said, “I’ll tell you something that pisses me off about London: Cup Finals. Now let’s say the Cup Final is Liverpool against Chelsea, well, they hold it down in London, don’t they, which gives Chelsea an unfair advantage for a start. They’re playing in their home town, their fans don’t have to come such a long way, they don’t have all that expense, they don’t have any trouble finding Wembley Stadium, whereas northern fans have all that hassle, having to hire a coach, having to pay fancy London prices for food and drink. It’s not fair.

“But then let’s say the Cup Final is Liverpool against Man. United, they stil have it in London so that it’s unfair to twice as many people. It can’t be right, can it?”

“Hit him again, would you, Philip?” Sands said, and Masterson did as he was asked.

“Oh, come on,” said Mick wearily. “Stop this crap. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. Don’t tell me you don’t know. A stag night. A stripper. A gang-rape…”

As he spoke he looked into their faces and the blankness there confirmed something that perhaps he had known all along. They surely had no reason now to keep up a pretence, but talk of rape really seemed to mean nothing to them.

For their part, they continued to think he was simply telling lies, simply trying to provoke them, and he was succeeding. Masterson hit him once again, a good blow this time that rocked him back in his seat. Mick was hurting and it showed, but even Masterson began to see that Mick’s ability to take punishment might be more than equal to his own taste for dishing it out. Perhaps he also realized that, insane as it appeared, Mick was actually telling the truth as he knew it.

“This is stupid,” said Pryce. “He’s hurt, he’s bleeding. He’s not going to tell us anything. We’ve had our revenge. Let’s just end this here.”

A couple of voices mumbled agreement but Justin Carr, perhaps having seen more movies than the others, was alive to other possibilities. He said, “And how exactly do we end it, eh, Graham? He’s rather effectively demonstrated that he knows where we all live…”

He let that hang in the air for a while, aware that it wasn’t a bad line, and slowly everyone turned towards Sands, who was looking much less like a leader now.

When nobody else said anything, Mick, sweating and in pain, experiencing a sickening sense of metal walls closing in on him, took the opportunity to speak.

“You know,” he said, “it seems to me you lads have landed yourselves in a bit of a predicament. OK, you’ve got me here, you’ve slapped me about a bit, you’ve got as much sense out of me as you’re going to get, so what are you going to do next? Let me go, and call that an end of it? I don’t think so. I really don’t. I mean, I might agree to it now, but why would I keep my word, eh? I don’t think the matter’s going to end here, do you? Justin’s right. I do know where you all live. I’ve tracked you all down once, and the moment you let me go I think you know I’m going to do it all over again. All you’ve done this morning is earn yourself another dose of the same. It’s the same game but you’ve raised the stakes. And I thought you were such smart lads,”

Anger buzzed in the air. The six men were angry because they knew he was right. They had considered themselves clever to have captured him, to have given themselves the means of taking revenge. But now the realization of their stupidity was setting over them like a plaster mould.

“So what do you do next?” Mick asked them. “Well, you can talk among yourselves, kick ideas around, if you like, but believe me, I know, save yourself some time. Sooner or later you’re going to come to the conclusion that the only sure way out of this is to kill me.

“Then two questions remain. Who’s going to do it and how? You don’t have guns as far as I can see, so which one of you is going to kill me with his bare hands? You, Masterson?”

“Killing was never part of the plan,” said Masterson.

“Absolutely not,” Lawton agreed.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” Carr agreed, “but he’s right. He’s given us no choice.”

“I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake,” Pryce bleated. “I’m supposed to save lives.”

“You’re a clever bastard, aren’t you?” Sands said to Mick.

“No, I’m just the muscle.”

“This is a disaster,” said Carr.

“It’s not the best,” Mick agreed.

“There must be a way out of this,” Slater said. “We’re reasonable men. We can negotiate. We can come to an agreement.”

Mick sat up in his seat, stared at each of his tormentors in turn, and did not look at all reasonable.

“This is a nightmare,” said Carr. “We either kill him, which we don’t want to do, or we release him, in which case we just set the whole thing in motion again.”

“I don’t know if it’s a nightmare,” Mick said, “but it certainly looks like a stalemate.”

However he was wrong. There had been no sound of a car, no footsteps on the gravel or on the floor of the workshop, but suddenly there was someone outside the carriage. The six men turned, furtively, guiltily, peered out through the dark, broken windows as Judy Tanaka strode in through the central set of carriage doors. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, sounding dangerously deranged, and shakily holding a gun out in front of her. Mick recognized it as his own. Her body was quaking and she extended her right hand, closed her eyes and let offhalf a dozen or so shots into the carriage.