Everyone Lies (9 page)

Simms laughed suddenly. ‘It’s the locality again,’ she said.

Fennimore adjusted the document so he could view the bullet points side by side with Simms’s image on Skype.

‘A clinic
could
be acting like a honey pot to addicts, but it still might be something in the deals that’s killing them – we just haven’t worked out what, yet. This really is a
very
small area, which probably means one particular dealer.’

‘A manhunt.’ Fennimore grinned. ‘The press will love that.’

Josh had begun packing away, and Simms reached for the keyboard mouse to end the session, but Fennimore raised a hand to stop her. ‘Kate.’

Her hand hovered over the mouse button.

Fennimore turned to Josh. ‘Go ahead.’

He waited for the door to close behind the student then leaned in close to the table mic and lowered his voice. ‘My name stays out of this.’

She frowned. ‘We already agreed that.’

‘We did. But that was you wanting to keep on the right side of Gifford. This is me, Kate. At some point, somebody will ask who’s been advising you. I don’t do well in the media spotlight.’ He heard a tremor in these last few words, and a shadow of pain and compassion passed fleetingly behind his friend’s eyes.

He felt an unexpected flood of emotion, a tightening of the muscles around his heart. ‘I—’ His throat closed and he couldn’t say any more.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you already screwed up my career once, Fennimore. Anyone asks who’s been advising me, I’d sooner say it was aliens sending messages through my iPod.’ She reached forward and her image vanished from the screen.

Fennimore smiled. It was exactly the right thing to say, and said with exactly the right amount of conviction. That one brief glimpse of compassion in her eyes had almost finished him – he couldn’t have borne her sympathy.

8

Dip is secured to a chair with duct tape. He is naked. Tufts of hair gather like plucked feathers at his feet – they have shaved his head. His hands are bound behind his back and tape has been wrapped around his upper torso; his legs are taped to the front legs of the chair, so he can’t close them. He knows this is a deliberate choice, and he has a good idea – no, not good, nothing about this could ever be good – but he does know what they are going to do to him, because laid out on a box two feet away are a soldering iron, a hammer, two sets of pliers and a Slendertone kit – the old kind, but with the electrodes stripped back and crocodile clips attached in place of the pads.

The chair is placed dead centre of an empty retail unit in Salford. It’s already dark, and lighting is provided by the headlamps of his boss’s Merc. The temperature has dropped to two degrees above freezing, but he’s sweating.

‘Boss, whatever you think I did, I didn’t do it.’ He tries to sound calm, reasonable, but he’s speaking too fast and he can’t get any strength behind the words.

His boss looks at the two men who brought Dip in. His face is a study in concentration. ‘Ready?’ he says.

Dip knows Beefy, but the other one is new to him. Beefy is six four and weighs as much as a small horse. He moves behind Dip’s chair. The other one stands to the side, his hands crossed in front of him. He is short and lean, like he didn’t get fed right when he was a kid, and his skin has the grey smudged look of a night worker or a convict. His neck is tattooed from his collar to his jawline. His eyes are small and dark and he has sharp features, like a jackal.

Behind him, the big man shifts his weight, his shoes whispering on the concrete floor. Dip cranes his neck, anxious to see what he’s doing.

‘I swear, Boss. I—’ Pain explodes in his nose. Jackal is fast as a whip – he didn’t even see it coming.

‘Hey! Wait till you’re told.’

Jackal takes a step back, but looks pissed off about it.

The boss leans closer. Dip’s eyes and nose are streaming and his heart feels like it’s trying to crawl out of his throat.

‘You’re all right,’ his boss says. ‘It’s not broken. Not even bleeding – but when I want you to speak, I’ll ask you a question. Are we clear?’

Dip nods, and his boss’s eyebrows twitch. ‘Yes, Boss.’

The boss straightens up, satisfied. His eyes flick to Beefy. Dip sees a flash of something then he’s suffocating. He opens his mouth, sucks hard, tastes plastic. He struggles, sees his boss watching him thoughtfully, as if he’s trying to understand what Dip wants. His mind is filled with
Can’t breathe.
He fights the bindings; they’re too strong. Beefy twists the bag tighter.
No air.
His boss’s face fades from the edges, Dip’s heart slows, falters.

*

He hears voices, first, in the dark. He knows he’s not dead, or if he’s dead, he’s in hell, because it’s his boss’s voice he can hear, and Beefy’s. He tries to be still. They are discussing which to use next: Slendertone or pliers. Beefy is standing at the box, helping him choose. Jackal is standing where he was before, so Dip thinks he can’t have been out for long.

‘Let’s ask him. Which d’you want, Dip?’

The boss’s back is turned to him, but he must have X-ray eyes or something, because when Dip shakes his head, he says, ‘Mate, you got to choose. Slendertone or pliers?’

‘I never messed you about, Boss. I always played it straight.’

‘I know it’s a big decision. I’ll give you a minute.’ He reaches inside a padded shoulder bag, takes out a laptop computer, turns it so that Dip can see the screen.

Oh, shit, they’re going to record it. They’re gonna put me on fucking YouTube.
His wife would see this. His fourteen-year-old son.

His boss makes a final adjustment, standing on the far side of the box and crouching to eye level with Dip, checking the height.

‘Made up your mind?’ he asks.

‘I won’t choose. Please don’t make me choose. I didn’t do nothing.’

‘D’you think we should go with the pliers?’ the boss asks Beefy. ‘I think we should go with the pliers.’

‘Boss, please, Boss. What the fuck—’

The boss laughs. ‘What the fuck? What the fuck? You can see it going round and round inside his head, can’t you?
What the fuck did I do?
’

The boss balls his hand into a fist and raps once, hard on Dip’s skull. ‘Think. You know what you did. Now make up your mind.’

Beefy hefts the pliers, a question on his face. The yellow plastic of the handles is stained a brownish red.

‘I can’t. I can’t.’

His boss says, ‘The pliers.’

‘No.’

‘I think that was a decision, Beefy.’

Beefy frowns, but he sets the pliers down.

The boss picks up the grey pebble-shaped controller for the toning machine, and offers the Jackal two metal rings. ‘Put these on him.’

‘Cock rings? You want me to touch his cock?’ Jackal shoves his hands in his pockets.

‘You’re just out from four years in the nick – don’t tell me you’re squeamish.’

Jackal ducks his head so low between his shoulders his neck disappears.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ The boss ditches the cock rings, flings the wires at him instead. ‘Here, use the clamps.’

Dip feels the bite of metal in his scrotum, and he howls.

His boss slaps him, open-handed, across the face. ‘Don’t be such a baby.’

Jackal attaches the second clamp and Dip screams again.

‘I mean it,’ the boss says. ‘You’re getting on my nerves – shut the fuck up.’

Dip presses his lips together, but can’t quite stifle the sound.

The wire jacks are connected to the controller and the boss squints at it. ‘Okay, so …’ He presses a button and Dip jerks, but feels only the tearing pain from the metal clamps. Even that begins to fade, receding to a dull throb.

‘You have to press that one, Boss,’ Beefy says, pointing.

‘Pleaseboss, pleaseboss. Pl
eeeease
.’

‘Oh, this one?’

Dip shrieks. Molten steel pours down his cock, his balls are aflame. He fights his restraints. He screams, pleading for it to stop, but the words don’t come out right.

‘What? I don’t know what you’re saying, mate. You’re not making sense. You’ve changed your mind? You want the pliers, is that it?’

He’s crying, he doesn’t want the pliers, he doesn’t want anything, except to make it stop.

His boss presses a button, and the pain subsides, but he can still feel the aftershock as tremors rippling across his lower abdomen. His thighs are shaking, rattling the legs of the chair, sending it jittering a few inches across the floor.

‘Please stop,’ he whispers.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the boss says. ‘Should’ve gone with the pliers. Don’t feel bad, Dip. Everyone makes the same mistake. Pliers are messy, so they go for the electrics. I mean, it’s not even plugged into the mains – it’s not like it can kill you, is it? Thing is, these things are designed to spread the shock over five-inch-wide stickon pads, so they really pack a punch. The crock clips are what – a quarter of an inch? You’re getting a concentrated jolt of electricity. And with electrics, you’re wired direct to the nerves. Nothing’s more painful than that – passing a
kidney stone
isn’t more painful than that.’

The shaking gets worse; Dip’s whole body is so racked with the aftershocks he can hardly speak. ‘J-just t-t-tell me w-w-what you want to knnnnnow. I’ll t-tell you a-anything.’

‘W-w-w-what I w-w-want to kn-n-n-ow?’ the boss mocks. ‘Okay. I want the truth.’

Dip shakes his head, crying, blubbing and gulping helplessly, tears and snot streaming down his face. ‘But I don’t know what I did.’

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ his boss says, ‘I can go all night with this. ’Cos it’s really no effort, see?’ He lifts the pebble-shaped control. ‘How do we crank this up?’

‘No-no. Wait, wait, wait. I’ll take the pliers. Please, Boss, don’t—’

His boss looks at Beefy. ‘He wants the pliers.’

Beefy shrugs and his boss turns to Dip, a chiding look on his face. ‘Sorry, Dip, lad. You made your choice.’ He adjusts the control. ‘Let’s see if we can speed things up a bit.’

The hurt is so intense, so beyond anything he has ever experienced, he feels he must die. But it goes on and on. Something seems to snap inside him like a rubber band and he looks down, horrified. His flesh steams, he can smell burning.

‘I’m on fire. Oh, no, oh Jesus, I’m on fire –
ohJesusGod
I’m burning!

For one sweet, blessed, holy second, the pain stops.

Jackal says, ‘He isn’t burning. He’s just pissed himself.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ the boss says. ‘Good conductor, piss.’ He looks down at the control in his hand and Dip says: ‘The consignment. It’s got to be the consignment.’ He wants to tell them what they want to hear, but the one bad thing he did is the one thing he knows they can’t know about.

The boss’s hand drops. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. The van. Three weeks ago.’

‘I did everything to the letter. I parked it in the Tesco 24/7 in Didsbury, locked it, walked away.’ His boss strokes the pebble that works the electric like it’s some kind of Zen relaxation. ‘I posted the keys at the agreed drop, just like it said in the docket.’

His boss doesn’t speak.

‘Look – did it get nicked, ’cos if it got nicked, it’s nothing to do with me. I swear—’

‘Did I say you nicked it?’

‘No, Boss.’

‘No, Boss. That van stayed on the car park for ten days. It got ticketed seven times, but it never got towed. Know why, Dip?’

Dip shakes his head fearfully.

‘’Cos the police were watching it, and they weren’t gonna let some car park Nazi tow it, because they wanted to catch the boys who were about to pick up 30 K’s worth of high-grade heroin. They were tipped off.’

‘No.’ Dip swings his head left and right in wide, sweeping movements. ‘No, Boss – I’m no grass.’

The boss nods to the Jackal and Dip flinches, but the Jackal walks to the computer. A Lucozade-orange view of the entrance to Tesco’s car park lights up the screen.

‘This is the twenty-first century, Dip,’ the boss says. ‘Surveillance society. Big Brother. Security footage.’ The recording switches to an image of one of the bays. ‘Oh, look, that’s you, driving in. Just like you said.’

Dip sees himself get out of the van. He looks over his shoulder, checks all around, making a big thing of it, and now he’s embarrassed because he looks like some guilty amateur. Embarrassed when he’s tied to a chair naked with electrodes attached to his balls – it’d be funny if he wasn’t so shit-scared.

‘Hang on,’ the boss says. ‘Wind back a bit.’ Jackal obliges. ‘Isn’t that you getting into the back of the van? Now, what would you do that for, when you were told to lock up and get the
fuck
out?’

‘I wanted to make sure nothing showed through the windows.’
It’s all right. Just keep your mouth shut. He can’t know.
‘I’m not lying. I seen some lads hanging around and I thought they looked a bit dodgy, so I got in the back to check everything was out of sight.’

‘Very conscientious. Highly commendable.’ He waits a moment. ‘And that took you ten minutes?’

Dip swallows, hears a dry click.
He can’t know. Just stay calm and stick to your story.

‘’Cos if you look at the little clock, here, you’ll see that the security camera times you getting into the back of the van at 6.05 and getting out again at 6.15.’

‘I dunno why,’ Dip says. ‘Must be something wrong with their clock.’

‘No, Dip. There’s something wrong with your head.’ He pokes Dip in the centre of his forehead. ‘You’re insulting my intelligence with that shit. You got in the back of the van with the … what did he call it?’

‘Consignment,’ Beefy says.

‘Consignment, that’s it. ’ His face is so close Dip can smell his breath – it smells like vodka and raw meat. ‘And you ripped me OFF.’

‘No. No. No-no-no-no.’ His heart is going so fast it’s a miracle it doesn’t burst. ‘No. Boss, I wouldn’t do that.’

The boss looks at Beefy. ‘He says he wouldn’t do that.’

Beefy’s eyes track over Dip’s face. He’s seen that flat look on Beefy’s face once before. Just before he glassed a bloke in a pub.