Blood Falls (36 page)

They clustered at the rear of the Range Rover, keyed up, anxious to project the right image. As a concession, Leon had worn jeans and a shirt with a collar. Fenton and Glenn were in suits, while Bruce had gone for cargo pants and a tight muscle vest that advertised his brute strength.

It was one-thirty. Leon rubbed his hands together. His palms were
slightly damp. This felt like a job interview, or a court appearance. Something to be endured.

‘Ready?’ he said.

There were nods, a few encouraging murmurs. For a second he thought of getting them all to bump fists or high five, like a sports team before the whistle blew.

But that was all bollocks. It would either go well or it wouldn’t.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

Joe had been heading towards Wincanton when Alise called. It turned out she was in Looe, over a hundred miles south-west of him – and in the opposite direction to Bristol. Going to see Alise now would mean abandoning the chance to retrieve his possessions.

He wasn’t conflicted for long. Dreaming up an excuse took even less time. He rang the number he’d been given for Leon’s home. Kestle answered, and Joe gave him a convincing account of a mysterious engine failure.

He claimed to be near Yeovil, in case they sent someone looking for him, and said a local garage was sending a breakdown truck. Kestle started on about one of their guys in Shaftesbury who might be able to help, so Joe pretended the signal was failing. He cut the call and switched his phone off.

The route to Looe was simple enough: a succession of A roads with stretches of dual-carriageway. The downside was that the rain hadn’t let up, and in places the road surface was treacherous. Joe had to find a delicate balance between driving safely for the conditions while also urging the most speed he could get from the tired, noisy van.

It took him nearly two and a half hours, with only a swift toilet break at the Harcombe Cross services. He drove with his full attention on the road, deliberately refusing to let his mind wander; not brooding or speculating on anything.

Descending into the Looe valley, between undulating hills of
woodland and fields, he was struck by the contrast with the wild and rugged north coast of Cornwall. The landscapes in the south seemed gentler, more tamed, but in their own way just as beautiful.

Looe consisted of two settlements either side of a river mouth. Despite the dreary weather, Joe’s first sight of the wide tidal estuary took his breath away. Nestled snugly in its valley, the town had the feel of a natural sanctuary from the world; by contrast, Trelennan crouched on its wooded slopes like something lying in wait for the unwary.

He followed the directions he’d been given and parked close to the railway station in East Looe. Then a short walk to the seafront, through a maze of narrow streets filled with gift shops and restaurants.

It was half past one when Joe entered a large, characterless cafe close to the beach. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, but what appetite he had vanished the moment he set eyes on Alise.

He had to stop and stare before he was sure it was her. She was in a booth, sitting tight against the wall, her handbag and a menu placed strategically on the edge of the table, as if to shield her from the other patrons. She was wearing a grey roll-neck jumper and a white knitted beret, as well as a comically large pair of sunglasses. Retro style, he guessed.

As Joe approached, she glanced round, smiled weakly and removed the sunglasses. There was nothing comical about what they had concealed.

Her face was a mass of bruises and abrasions. A large swelling around her left eye caused her temple to bulge outwards, the skin black and purple, stretched so tightly that it looked like it was about to burst. There were scabs on her lip and a laceration on her chin that had needed half a dozen stitches: he could see the raw pinpricks where they had recently been removed.

Alise rose to her feet, as frail and unsteady as a woman twice her age. Her hands were scratched and bruised. She embraced Joe,
clutched him tightly and thanked him. Joe brushed off her gratitude as unneeded, almost inappropriate.

He wouldn’t say it out loud, but what he thought was quite straightforward, and totally resolute.

Thank me when I’ve dealt with the men who did this to you
.

Sixty-Five

LEON HUNG BACK
in the hotel lobby, content to let somebody else go to the desk. He felt excluded enough without having the staff looking down their noses at him.

Fenton returned with directions and led them into the depths of the hotel. It was all marble floors and chandeliers and statues; an atrium with a bloody great fountain. Leon tried not to notice because he knew he was supposed to be impressed, and he didn’t want anything in here to impress him.

He found he was clawing at his leg as he walked, literally trying to get a grip on himself. A voice chattering nonsense in his head, like a madman in the corner of the room.

What was wrong with him, for Christ’s sake?

Morton had hired one of the hotel’s conference suites. In similar rooms they glimpsed rows of sad suits, hypnotised by spreadsheets on a whiteboard. Fenton and Glenn were joking about ‘death by PowerPoint’ but Leon growled at them to shut up. It was white noise, and all it did was draw the next migraine a bit closer.

The anteroom outside the Branson Suite was guarded by two men in suits. Not the usual gorillas: they were smaller than Glenn, let alone Bruce, but they had a quiet, purposeful manner that conveyed a lot of menace. Leon could see a slight bulge in their jackets, about where a shoulder holster would be.

He felt his mouth go dry. He turned to gauge what the others made of all this, but no one would meet his eye. Then Fenton was handing him a phone, though Leon hadn’t even heard him take a call.
What the hell
…

He grabbed the phone, backing away from the guards. ‘Yeah?’

It was Kestle. ‘Thought you should know, boss. I just got a call from Joe. The van’s broke down on him and he can’t make his rounds today.’

‘What?’ Leon must have shouted: everyone was staring at him. ‘Where is he?’

‘Yeovil. Says he’s been on to a garage and he’s waiting for them to come out. I’ve tried ringing back to find out more, but his phone’s off.’

Leon groaned. He didn’t have a single clear thought that made any sense. At the door, Fenton was talking quietly with one of the men. Glenn, listening in, turned to Leon and shrugged a question. As though Leon was a bloody mind-reader.

He was still focused on Joe. The vans did a lot of mileage. From time to time things went wrong with them, so the breakdown could be genuine. On the other hand, it could mean he’d got wind of their plan and was doing a runner …

Victor Smith’s words came back to him:
If I sold him to Danny Morton and couldn’t deliver, I’d be a dead man
.

‘Keep on it,’ he told Kestle. ‘Let me know as soon as you speak to him.’

Glenn was ready with the next problem. ‘They want us to hand over our phones.’

As Leon marched over, one of the guards shifted his stance, his jacket falling open. ‘These are our standard security measures,’ the other one was saying. ‘Not negotiable, under any circumstances.’

‘What are they?’ Leon asked.

The guard turned to a small table and picked up two hand-held body scanners. ‘You submit to a check with these. No phones, watches, jewellery or electronic devices allowed through. And a maximum of
three people go in.’ He pointed at Bruce. ‘I suggest he remains with us.’ His voice was well educated, with that strange honking tone people had in the South-East.

Talking through their noses as well as looking down them, Leon thought. He pulled Fenton aside. ‘Joe called to say his van broke down. Now he’s turned his phone off.’

Fenton’s eyes widened. He did his gulping-goldfish act.

‘Yeah, I dunno what it means either,’ Leon snarled. ‘Let’s just get this done.’

He stepped towards the guards, opening his arms in surrender.

Six days ago Joe had sat in a cafe with Alise and listened to the account of her sister’s disappearance. Now he heard the story of her own.

She’d been abducted by three or four men, just a couple of hours after parting from Joe. Probably while Leon was offering him a job. Later she got a look at them; from her descriptions he identified Reece and Todd, and possibly the man he’d met out on the deck the other day. Bruce somebody.

That night she’d been taken to Leon’s home and interrogated, brutally, by Leon himself. He had inflicted many of her injuries, the worst of which was a fracture to her eye socket. The doctors had told her she was lucky to have kept her sight.

Joe felt overcome: by shame, because he’d been so tempted to dismiss her allegations; then by shock at the severity of her injuries. Next came guilt, because essentially Alise had been punished for talking to him.

Finally, deep down, building slowly and methodically, there was rage, and a desire for vengeance.

Once Leon had had his fun, Alise was force-fed a bottle of vodka, driven to the Rame Peninsula, south of Plymouth, and thrown over a cliff. Her body had rolled down the steep grass bank and onto the rocky beach below. By pure fluke she’d landed just above the high-tide mark, otherwise she would have drowned.

‘A man with his dog found me the next morning. My body was so cold, he thought I was dead. In hospital they say I had one more hour, maybe less.’

Rushed to intensive care, Alise didn’t properly regain consciousness until Saturday. It was only when a duty psychiatrist came to conduct a mental-health assessment that she realised the assumption everyone had made.

‘They think I have tried to kill myself. Exactly as Leon plans it to be.’

Joe couldn’t argue with that. The fall onto the rocks conveniently explained her injuries, and her backstory – a futile search for her missing sister, the threatened loss of her job and her relationship – completed an ideal scenario for suicide. Joe felt certain that would have been the coroner’s verdict at the inquest.

‘Did you tell anyone what really happened?’

‘A policewoman came while I am still confused. The things I say make no sense. Later, when I start to feel better, I see there is no point telling the truth. I cannot prove it happened this way. So next time I say I don’t remember.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You see why Leon is so dangerous? You believe me now that he killed my sister?’

Alise’s hands were gripped together to stop them shaking. Joe placed his own hand over them. He nodded.

‘Yes, I do.’

Being patted down and checked with the electronic wand was humiliating. Leon endured it by closing his eyes and pretending he was at an airport, where everybody had to put up with this shit.

They gave his shoes a thorough going-over before handing them back, but they held on to his watch and his belt. Fenton and Glenn must have sensed how close he was to storming out because they shuffled into formation behind him, blocking his exit.

The Branson Suite was big enough for about fifty people. In one corner there was a stack of tables and chairs, piled up the way they
used to be at school. A couple of tables had been placed end to end in the centre of the room, like a barrier, with chairs on each side. Three vacant seats with their backs to the door: for Leon’s team.

On the other side, three more chairs. The middle one was empty, the other two were occupied by men who looked far from comfortable in their tight suits. Not neat and civilised, like the guards on the door. One had long matted hair and the other had a buzz cut around a bald spot the size of a saucer. Both were unshaven, with bad skin and bad teeth. They looked mean and greasy and savage. Thugs.

At the sight of them, Leon relaxed a little. These were men from his own world: council estates, broken families, vicious competition for scarce resources and feral, ruthless violence from the moment you could grab and run.

Leon spotted movement across the room, almost lost in the shadows of the colossal floor-to-ceiling drapes. A man and a woman, standing close together. The woman had long black hair, in dazzling contrast to her crisp white blouse.

Glenn noticed her, too, and blew out a loud breath in appreciation. She was slim and curvy, in a tight grey pencil skirt, split to show a sliver of thigh. Like a secretary in a decent-quality porno, Leon thought.

By comparison, the man was pretty forgettable. Unlike the others, he was in jeans and a black T-shirt. He was average height, wiry, with short spiky brown hair. Although he must have heard them come in, he kept his back to them, as though he couldn’t give a shit who had just joined the party.

With a terse nod at the other two, Leon pulled the middle chair a foot or so back from the table and sat down. Glenn and Fenton followed suit, sitting each side of him.

Finally the man at the window turned and wandered towards them, sighing with vague irritation, as though this was another minor chore on a long list. He was rubbing absently at his cheek, and when he dropped his hand Leon saw the puckered scar of an old puncture wound.

‘Mr Morton?’ Fenton rose to his feet and extended his hand.

The man nodded. He sat down without responding to the handshake. Leon snorted, remembering how he’d done the same thing to the journalist.

‘Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,’ Fenton went on. ‘I’m confident that you’ll agree it will be tremendously beneficial—’

‘You’re in charge, yeah?’ Danny Morton flapped a hand at Leon. His eyes were small and dark, like buttons.

‘Yeah. I’m Leon Race.’

‘So how about you do the talking, while Mr Blobby here shuts his fucking cakehole?’

Silence. Morton’s men smirked. Leon couldn’t see Fenton or Glenn’s reaction, and he didn’t want to look. The woman was still by the far wall, ignoring them completely.

‘You ever heard the word “entrapment”?’ Morton asked.

‘What?’

‘Entrapment. You know what it means?’

Leon took a deep breath. Told himself this didn’t matter. It was like Glenn had said: Morton was trying to wind him up.