Courting Trouble (36 page)

Nathaniel’s face distorted into a red gargoyle mask. ‘I’m fucking freezing. Give me back my clothes. I could catch pneumonia.’

‘You know, I don’t think your long-term health is a major concern for you right now . . .’ Danny stated.

‘Mind you. It’s so thoughtful to die young enough to make sure that the funeral crowd will be fashionable and good-looking,’ Roxy mused.

I gawped at them both. I was a Jane Austen-reading, chocoholic pacifist. I was equipped to kill someone only one way – with kindness.

‘Yeah.’ Danny picked up Roxy’s theme. ‘I always think that, if you’re going to die, you should try to be considerate about it, you know, and die in a manner that entertains people. A blind date with Hannibal Lecter or home liposuction with a vacuum cleaner or a violent inflatable-sex-doll explosion. Which is why I have something quite colourful in mind . . .’

Danny pointed his torch to a darkened corner of the shed. The beam illuminated a small children’s paddling pool. ‘A little something I pumped up earlier,’ Danny clarified. I now noticed a garden hose draped over the pool edge, which ran in from outside. He disappeared for a moment to turn on the tap. As water gushed into the pool, Danny wheeled in a huge sealed bucket. He removed the plastic lid and peered inside.

‘What is it?’ I asked, sick with anxiety.

‘A fish that could give the great white shark competition as the most terror-inspiring creature of the deep. On my travels around the world, this is the species that petrified me the most.’

‘A fish? Really? Why?’ Roxy asked, intrigued.

‘Well, its appearance for one. Take a look . . .’

Roxy and I took a tentative peek into the bucket. A fish which could easily play the part of a sci-fi monster in a spoof-horror flick was thrashing about in the water. At three foot long and weighing four stone, it resembled a giant piranha, except for the fact that the teeth looked uncannily human.

‘Ugly bugger, isn’t it? But it’s the diet of the pacu fish which makes it so horrifying,’ Danny explained, tipping the creature from the bucket into the plastic pond, where it started snapping viciously. Roxy and I instinctively drew back from the pool’s edge. ‘You see, the pacu has a penchant for men’s testicles.’

I winced, horrified. I’d obviously been secretly cast in some Mario Puzo
Godfather
remake in which people were dispatched to sleep with the fishes.

‘Um, just one question. How did you find an Amazonian fish in North London?’ Roxy marvelled.

‘I just happen to have a friend who’s a collector of exotic fish species. Ex-SAS.’

‘Is there anyone you
don’t
know?’ I said. The man’s Christmas-card list must be longer than Proust’s seven-volume
Remembrance of Things Past.

‘They bite because they’re hungry, and testicles sit nicely in their mouth. The big bugger hasn’t been fed all week, so he’s ravenous. Fishermen in South America attacked by the pacu usually bleed to death after losing their nuts in the fish’s vicious fangs.’

The whole time Danny was speaking, he was rocking Nathaniel’s chair towards the pool. Nathaniel’s face had gone arctic white and, despite his protestations about the cold, his complexion now glistened with sweat.

I seized my mother’s arm. ‘Okay, this is getting seriously insane. My daughter is missing. Let’s just call the police.’ Not only did I not have a licence to kill, I didn’t even have a learner’s permit.

Roxy cupped her hand to my ear and whispered, ‘Just play along.’ She took a knife from Danny’s belt and approached Nathaniel, who immediately started whimpering.

‘Don’t worry, mate. I’ve never castrated a man I didn’t like.’ In one deft movement, my mother sliced through his shorts. I looked down at the bound man whom I’d so recently bedded. His manhood had shrunk to the size of a pea. As Danny tilted his chair towards the water, Nathaniel let out a scream normally associated with childbirth.

‘Oh, grow a pair, mate . . . mind you – soon you might have to,’ Danny chortled. He returned the chair back on to all four legs for a moment. ‘I think it’s time we put you into the pool, don’t you? . . . Unless you’re feeling more chatty.’

‘Just tell us where Portia is and where you’ve hidden the DVDs. You mentioned something to Matilda about a safety-deposit box? . . .’ Roxy waved the knife near his penis. ‘You really don’t want to mess with a woman who is all out of HRT and has a scalpel.’

‘Okay, I think it’s time our untalkative friend here went for a little dip, don’t you?’ Danny trained the gun on his captive. ‘Untie him, Roxy.’

But, as soon as she did so, Nathaniel kicked out at Danny in an attempt to knock the gun from his hand. With a speed that belied his age, Danny floored the prisoner with a karate chop. Nathaniel slid into the plastic pool like a startled otter from a riverbank. ‘Never hit anyone below the belt, bud, particularly a black one earned in ju-jitsu,’ Danny quipped. ‘Oh, and by the way, who exactly were you calling “washed up”?’

Nathaniel was now crouched in the centre of the paddling pool, his knees clasped to his chest. Danny had his gun trained at the man’s head. Roxy aimed her knife at his heart. A comma of blood appeared on Nathaniel’s grazed knee and started to drip into the water, exciting the fish, which circled closer and closer in the rising swirl. As the water level in the pool got higher, the frantic fish arced nearer and nearer to its human prey. The water inched upwards. When it lapped Nathaniel’s testicles, the man made a weird grunting noise, which I imagine involved a quick conversion to religion.

‘The last guy whose testicles I fed to this fish took longer to die than a friggin’ opera singer. But the good thing about bleeding to death is that all your organs are still intact.’

‘Exactly,’ Roxy chorused. ‘So, let’s not think of it as murder but more as a kidney-transplant scheme.’

‘All right! All right! You sick fucks!’ Nathaniel yelped. ‘Your daughter’s volunteering for my mentoring charity. There’s a fundraising karaoke night. St Mary’s Church. She’s selling tickets at the door.’

Danny kept him in the pool at gunpoint until a snivelling Nathaniel had confided the exact address of the church hall and the location and number of the safety-deposit box in Hatton Gardens where the DVDs were stashed. He also confirmed that the bastard rapist Bash was the only other person with a key.

My memory of the hours that followed is fuzzy. Anger as keen and cutting as a razor blade’s edge kept terror at bay. I recall collecting Portia and being too thankful to be furious. Relief relaxed the skin around my temples, and my chest unknotted.

‘I promised to help, Mummy. And I knew you wouldn’t let me come,’ she stammered, guilt-stricken.

‘Shhhh. It’s okay. We’ll talk about it later.’

I remember ringing Amelia’s mother and pleading with her to let my daughter sleep over, clearly maintaining my winning position of World’s Worst Parent at the next school PTA meeting. I recall drinking plantations of coffee to stay awake, then driving in a wishy-washy rain to Hatton Gardens, where we accessed the safety-deposit box. I recall two half-moons of sweat appearing in Roxy’s armpits as we extracted fifteen DVDs, one of which had my name on it, plus wads of money. The dosh we’d use to repay the Countess for her losses on Chantelle’s private prosecution. The rest we’d donate to a rape crisis centre. The disks? Well, we were pretty sure no woman would ever want these watched by an office full of policemen, let alone a jury. As they’d all been edited and overdubbed to look consensual anyway, we snapped them in half and stomped on the memory stick with them. Roxy deleted all the footage from Nathaniel’s phone, which she’d already confiscated and then we just clung together in an exhausted embrace, like boxers nearing the end of a bout.

It was midnight by the time we got back to the shed, to find Danny and Nathaniel sitting motionless in a bizarre private tableau. Nathaniel was wearing a silver tiara and a pink tutu, hoiked up around his waist. He had a Tinky Winky glove puppet on his hand, a hand with which he was half-heartedly masturbating to a
Teletubbies
episode which was showing on the iPad propped up beside him.

Danny had the gun in one hand and was filming the event with the other. ‘Tug harder,’ he instructed. ‘Put some effort into it . . . Christ. It feels disturbing even saying that! Welcome, ladies. We’ve had a very interesting time in your absence. After Nathaniel had a few oxygen-deprivation issues, he finally felt inclined to tell me all about his life. It’s been most enlightening.’

One side of Nathaniel’s face was shiny and swollen, testifying to an eventful few encounters in my absence.

‘As Tilly told us, Nathaniel does indeed work for the kingpin of an international network of organized criminal gangs. They flood the UK with millions of pounds worth of illegal drugs. So, after he got disinherited by his obviously astute parents, and put under investigation by his bank, the fuckwad turned to drug trafficking and money laundering to fund his lavish lifestyle. In fact, there’s a big drug delivery due tomorrow from Turkey – 57kg of heroin, 15,000 ecstasy tablets and a batch of pure MDMA powder. The heroin has a street value of almost £7 mill. The ecstasy tabs are worth half a mill . . . the drugs come into the country labelled as legitimate products. He maintains a network of serviced virtual offices across the UK to which the drugs are delivered, and of van drivers, enforcers and dealers who then take the merchandise on to the estates. He gets his boys to rape girls so they can be blackmailed into running drugs, because girls don’t get stopped and searched like boys do. And it’s all under the guise of his charitable works. The man’s a class act, as you can see.’

‘Ah . . . that’s all fascinating, Danny. But would you mind talking me through this rather unusual scenario,’ I asked tentatively. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Insurance. We need insurance to make sure this tosser never tries this shit again on any girl. And that he doesn’t try to exact revenge on any of us. And to make sure, now that I’ve flipped him into an informer, that he can never go back on his word.’

‘You flipped him?’ Roxy asked, impressed.

‘Yep. He’s agreed to a deal. My mate on the drug squad’s on his way over now. Nathaniel’s gonna wear body wires to get electronic evidence so we can roll his bosses further up the line, who have no idea, as yet, that there’s a chink in their armour.’

Roxy squeezed out a chuckle. ‘Basically, we’ve got you by the short and curlies, matey. If you don’t obey our orders, this little video of you goes all over the Internet,’ she explained to our miserable captive. ‘I think we’ll call it “Reach Out and Touch Yourself”.’

‘I filmed his little confession, too. For the cops. I’ve now got so much incriminating footage, even friggin’ Houdini couldn’t get out of this one.’

‘So, basically, we own you,’ I said, tossing Nathaniel’s words back at him.

‘One false move and the whole of the estate will know you’re a paedo who wanks over kiddie shows in a pink tutu,’ Roxy warned. ‘They’ll be on you like a pack of half-starved hyenas.’

‘You’ll be begging to go to prison for safety . . . And you’ll think you’re safe . . . until the night you get ambushed by a lifer and knifed in the back for being a rock spider.’

I looked at Nathaniel in his ludicrously lurid pose. His face was puce with fury. The colour went quite well with his pink tutu, actually. ‘Well, Nathaniel, you have to agree, there’s a certain cinematic symmetry to it. The blackmailed blackmailing the blackmailer.’

‘Poetic justice. The only true justice in the world.’ Danny winked at me. ‘And I say that, even though I’m the rather proud father of a very brilliant lawyer.’

I squeezed open my eyes the following morning and, after a few minutes of disorientated incredulity, realized that I hadn’t overindulged on the cheese platter and that I really had actually kidnapped, terrorized and blackmailed a drug baron.

I squinted at the clock. It was only 10 a.m. Still, I pondered, it must be happy hour
somewhere
on the planet. Surely I could have just one little drink to steady my nerves? Because, as I thought over the events of the previous day, the aftershock of my own behaviour reverberated through me. I heard a low, incoherent moaning and slowly realized that this strange disembodied sound was my own voice. Who had I become? I had compromised my core belief system and taken the law into my own hands. I was little better than a common thief. A vigilante. A desperado highwayman bandit-type bushranger. If I were writing an updated rap sheet for myself, it would now read:

Matilda Devine

35, mother of one gorgeous, if slightly disobedient girl, whom I’d put in serious danger . . . and daughter of a renegade mum with a heart of gold whom I often woefully underappreciated.

Previous convictions
: that Jack Cassidy was an A-grade ratbag way back in law school when he took my virginity and he always would be.

Current convictions
: that I’d convicted Jack Cassidy of leaking information to the defence without any hard evidence and with no chance of a fair trial.

Misdemeanours
: taking the law into my own hands and betraying everything I believed in.

Future convictions:
that clearly I was the one who should be on trial, for going for gold in the hypocrisy Olympics.

Crimes of the heart
: yes, my relationships with Stephen and Nathaniel made me a pathetic hit-and-run-romance casualty. Yes, it was no wonder that my trust in men was now so minuscule it could only be located by X-ray. But I, too, had been unfair, refusing redemption to my long-lost father. And, even worse, being totally judgemental and prejudiced against the one man who had ever really meant anything to me.

A conscience, I now discovered, is what hurts when all your other parts feel fine.

Still, one thing was startlingly clear. I was not cut out for life at Pandora’s. I had to resign immediately and take a nice, quiet job in a nice, steady practice, handling nothing more stressful than parking infringements and jay-walking fines. I would spend the rest of my legal life grazing on the easiest of cases, like one long, bland buffet.