Dead Air Read online

  Sweet Jesus H. Christ; the whisky. There had been something in the whisky. What was that date-rape drug? I couldn’t remember. But something like that. The drink she’d insisted she’d get, then watched me drink, or thought that was what she was watching while I suppressed a giggle and played my silly game and anointed Phil’s jacket with the stuff instead, distracting her, making my Adam’s apple go up and down, smacking my lips and doing everything but wipe my mouth on my sleeve; look, I’m drinking it! See? It’s gone! She’d put something in it. She must have. What was that date-rape stuff? Euthymol? No, that was a toothpaste, wasn’t it? A fucking Micky fucking Finn in this fucking day and fucking age and I’d fucking fallen for it! Or would have, if I hadn’t been determined to salvage some dregs of sobriety from my drunken stupor for the purposes of, hopefully, fucking.

  Oh shit.

  I’d sniffed it. The whisky with the date-rape drug or whatever it was; I’d breathed it in. How powerful was that stuff? Some must have stuck to my lips when I pretended to drink it. Was I falling into a drugged sleep now? No. No definitely not me, no-how, no-way. Very awake and horribly, edgily, tensely sober with my heart hammering so hard I’m astonished that Raine, if that’s really her name, can’t hear it, that she can’t see my entire body shaking with each thudding, crashing, flailing tremor of it.

  ‘You aw-wight?’ the driver asks. For one idiotic moment I think he’s talking to me, and for a totally deranged micro-moment I’m actually about to answer him.

  Then the girl says, ‘Yeah,’ quite casually, as though she’s bored.

  I open one eye very slightly, the left one, away from her. Where are we? I have a vague feeling we’re somewhere in the East End but I don’t know. My head is down and I can’t see much without raising it. How long did the driver say? Five minutes? Yes, it was five minutes. But how long ago was that? One minute ago? Two? Four?

  I can see the little red tell-tale light on the door at my side, near the handle. Of course; cab doors lock while the vehicle is in motion. Safety device, allegedly. Stop you doing a runner, more like. Doesn’t matter. I can’t just make a break for it when we slow down. Have to wait for a complete stop. Shit. We slow down here, and I start to get sweaty palms, thinking about grabbing the door handle and sprinting off… but then we speed up again.

  I use the acceleration as a plausible excuse to let my head fall back, my neck over the back of the seat now and my view through my half-closed eye a bit better. I sense Raine looking at me. I start snoring. Through the trembling blur of eyelashes, I can see a lightly trafficked road and low-rise buildings. I must really have dropped off. We’re well away from the West End here. We take a left into a darker, quieter road. What look like low warehouses and light industrial units line the road. I see plentiful graffiti and billboards with old, torn, rain-sodden posters flapping in the cold wind. We go under a bridge, engine echoing off the rivet-studded undersides of massive black girders.

  ‘Nearly there,’ the driver says.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ says Raine.

  We slow. There’s a brighter, noisier road ahead. And traffic lights.

  ‘Just over these lights.’

  Turning amber.

  ‘Right.’

  Thank fuck.

  ‘Yeah, I fink that’s Danny there I can see.’

  Turning red.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Oh yes. Oh yes, just stop right here on the far side of the busy traffic from wherever it is we’re going, from whoever the fuck Danny is.

  The cab stops, engine idling noisily. The little red light by the door handle should click and go off now. Now. There’s a click. I wait for the little red light to go off. It doesn’t.

  Something in my bowels makes a terrible trembling course through me, squeezing cold sweat from every pore. The driver; taxi drivers can override the door-locks’ stationary off-switch, keeping it on. He’s locked us in.

  I’m fucked. These people can do whatever they want to me. I may be about to die. The lights are still red but the traffic crossing our path has just stopped. The driver is reaching for the gear stick.

  I sit up suddenly. Raine looks at me and her mouth starts to open as her eyes finish widening. I click my seat belt unlocked and swing my right leg as hard as I can at the window to my left. It shatters first time. It feels like my leg does too, but the window’s gone in an almighty bang, falling spraying to the street outside and the rubber-matted floor of the cab in a thousand square-edged little jewels glinting sodium in the street-light.

  The driver’s shocked face turns towards me. Raine grabs my arm and I do something I’ve never done before, ever; I hit a woman. Punch her square in the nose and send her head whacking back against the door window on her side.

  Then I’m out of the smashed window on my side so fucking fast John Woo would be proud of me, turning on my back, hands to the top of the frame and levering myself out with just some kicking, flailing footwork to spoil the balletic beauty of it.

  I land with a wind-expelling whumpf on the road, just as the taxi jerks forward and then screeches to a stop again, nose dipping. I’m rolling on the broken glass and bouncing to my feet, starting to run. There’s shouting behind me and a door slamming. More shouting from further away. These both male. Female screaming now. The road ahead is broad and almost deserted. Some parked cars, one or two Transits and Lutons. I angle for the pavement, to put some of the parked stuff between me and them. More shouting and screaming.

  The wind roars in my ears as I run. Engine noise back there now. I’m near the end of the street. The engine behind me whines, caught in the low gear of reverse, then the engine seems to cut out, there’s a squeal of tyres, a moment of silence, and the engine screams. Handbrake turn.

  I run out onto the street ahead at right-angles and pelt across a sudden burst of traffic, horns blaring right and left as I leap a traffic island in one stride and spot a chip shop with a queue of people outside, a hundred metres away. I make the pavement, just dodging a Royal Mail van, which skids to a stop so close I have my arm stuck out and the grille nudges the flesh of my palm. I run for the chip shop queue, dodging between a few slowly walking people like gates on a downhill slalom course. The Royal Mail van races past to my left, the driver leaning out of the window, shouting that I’m a fucking wanker and backing this up with a gesture. There are two cars at the kerb just beyond the queue at the chip shop. I splash through a puddle. The rain is off, I notice. The cars beyond the chip shop are parked outside a little lit doorway and window with a cheap-looking sign above, glaring yellow-white above the pitted brickwork and spelling out the two most beautiful words in the most beautiful language in the universe: Mini-Cabs.

  I slow and look back just as I get to the queue but there’s no taxi anywhere to be seen, and nobody running. I straighten my jacket, run fingers through my hair and by the time I get to the first cab in the rank, nodding first to the guy in the doorway and then at the car, I’m actually whistling.

  ‘Well, do you ever look at the number of a cab when you get into one?’

  ‘Na,’ Craig admitted. ‘Who does?’

  ‘Phil, probably,’ I said. I’d called him on his mobile and home number but only got answer machines.

  ‘I still think,’ Craig said, ‘you should have gone to the police.’

  ‘Christ, man, I just wanted to get away.’

  ‘Yeah, but.’

  ‘Yeah but what? It was half eleven on a Friday night. The cops are going to be busy enough with fights and brawls and the usual weekend nonsense. And what exactly would I be ringing up to report, anyway? I think I was being kidnapped, I think somebody tried to spike my drink, but if you want any proof you’ll have to get another guy’s jacket and test it for the drug, if it’s still detectable. I think some violence was planned for me but I don’t know. I’m fairly sure I was chased but that’s not even illegal. Fucking hell, the only definitely criminal things that actually happened were the things I did; I smashed a cab window and I punched a woman in the
face. I fucking hit a woman, man! Jesus Christ, that was something I had hoped to get through my whole life without doing, like breaking a major bone or changing a nappy.’ I sucked very hard on the J. I’d wanted a brandy or something but Craig had reckoned what I needed was a nice, mellow smoke.

  My very first thought, once I’d got into the cab and told the guy to head for Basildon (this had to be east of wherever we were, so it meant we didn’t need to chuck a U-ey and go past the end of the road I’d been chased down), was to call Amy. She lived in Greenwich, which was feasibly in the area, and turning to her – and up on her doorstep – in an hour of need, on the run from heavies, might be just the sort of romantic ice-breaker required to shift our relationship onto whatever next phase might be on the cards (the last time I’d seen her had been on 11 September, when we’d all sat together in Kulwinder and Faye’s loft, watching the unbelievable unfold, until she’d been called away by her boss).

  Then I thought of Celia. Christ; Merrial. Maybe he was behind whatever had almost happened back there.

  I don’t know who I’d imagined might want to have me kidnapped and whisked off to the East End for… whatever, but of course Celia’s husband had to be a prime suspect. Why the hell hadn’t that been the first thing I’d thought of? Could this be anything to do with Celia and me? Had we been discovered? We thought we’d been so careful, but who really knew?

  Oh shit. Should I use the mobile number she didn’t know I had, try to warn her?

  But if it wasn’t anything to do with her, with us, and she discovered I’d taken her number without asking, without telling her…

  Yeah, but if all this was about us then it was entirely possible a phone call could save her life.

  ‘I’m Ken, by the way,’ I said to the guy driving the mini-cab. He was a strapping white lad with a shock of red-dyed hair. I’d sat beside him rather than in the back. We shook hands.

  ‘Dive.’

  ‘Dave, I’ve a bit of a funny request.’

  ‘Yeah? Wossat?’

  ‘Can I use your mobile? I’ve got one of my own but I need to use a different one. Please? Add a fiver to the fare. It’s important. ’

  ‘Here you go.’

  ‘You are a saint, sir.’ I pulled out my own mobile, cursored through to Ceel’s entered but never used number, and clicked it into Dave’s Sony.

  ‘The mobile phone you are calling is switched off…’

  Another couple of tries got the same response. No voice mail or message service available. ‘Thanks,’ I said to Dave the driver, handing him back his phone. ‘Never got through.’ I hesitated. ‘Listen, Dave; what I said about a fiver? Call it a tenner, but in the unlikely event a woman… anybody ever phones about a call made, like, now, just say you dialled the same wrong number or something.’

  ‘“You never saw me, I wasn’t here,”’ the lad quoted, grinning. ‘Used to work in a boozer, mate; lying to people on the phone looking for somebody they fink’s there is like second nature.’

  ‘Yeah, well, cheers,’ I said. I tried Amy next, on my own phone, but her mobile was switched to message and the land-line to her place in Greenwich was on answer, with a long beep-time of stacked messages before the tone. I sighed and rang Craig. He was in, sitting watching TV, about to go to bed.

  ‘Okay, Dave,’ I said. ‘Change of destination…’

  I tried Celia’s mobile again from a phone box near Craig’s place in Highgate. Still nothing.

  ‘You should still go to the cops,’ Craig said again, looking down at the big old Geographia London Street Plan he’d spread on the kitchen table, to see if we could work out where it had all happened. Idiotically, I hadn’t thought to get the number or the name of the mini-cab company. The first thing I remembered from the drive was seeing a sign for Stratford station, off to our left as we’d headed in the general direction of Essex. ‘Report what happened,’ Craig insisted. ‘Because of what might happen.’

  ‘Because of what might happen?’ I echoed.

  ‘Supposing something else does, and it has to be something the cops get involved in; if what happened tonight comes out they’re going to want to know why you didn’t mention anything about it. You’ve got to report it, man. The cops might be able to find out if an old taxi gets its left window repaired over the next couple of days.’

  ‘I doubt that a kidnap that never really happened will be far up their list of priorities just now, plus I have said one or two unflattering things about the boys in blue, over the years,’ I observed. Dryly, I hoped. I was still shaking, and my leg hurt where I’d kicked the window out; I was going to have a splendid bruise in a day or two. There were various other mysterious aches, pains, grazes and likely bruises I couldn’t recall picking up in all the excitement, plus my hands and fingers were a little cut where I’d grabbed the window. Craig had handed me a bottle of TCP and some kitchen towel and told me to get on with it.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you still have to report it.’

  ‘What exactly is this stuff that might happen? What were you thinking of?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Craig stretched his lanky frame back in the kitchen chair and put his hands behind his head. ‘You don’t have any idea who these people were?’

  ‘They were both white, south-east England, maybe London. There was somebody I didn’t see called Danny. The place I was being taken to was in the East End and the driver seemed to know the area. I’d guess he’s a proper taxi driver, done the Knowledge. It was…’ I gestured at the map in front of us. ‘There, somewhere.’

  ‘Suspects? Motives?’ Craig asked, grinning.

  ‘Stop enjoying this, you bastard.’

  ‘No, I’m being serious. Can you think of any suspects and what their motives might be?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, do you want them alphabetically or in order of appearance? The world is basically composed of people who want me dead, and my close friends.’

  ‘I’m not sure those are mutually exclusive categories.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘That’s a tad paranoid, even for you.’

  ‘Craig, I’ve lost count of the death threats I’ve had over the years. We have to report each one to the local nick. They have a photocopied report form with my details already filled in. The people who open my mail get danger money. I’m not joking.’

  ‘You told me it was dirty money.’

  ‘Okay, it’s mostly shit, not bombs, but still. The point is lots of people have claimed to want me dead, and that’s just the ones who feel a burning desire to tell me. This could be fundamentalists of any persuasion, a corporate hit-job-’

  Craig sniggered. ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Excuse me? I have affected the share price of large corporations. That’s a capital offence.’

  ‘Yeah, ha ha. Colour me chortle. But no, you haven’t. Not alone,’ Craig said. ‘You’re not an investigative reporter or anything, Ken. You’re a commentator. You comment on what others have dug up. If you didn’t, somebody else would, people who do dig stuff up. Private Eye, Mark Thomas… I don’t know; Rory Bremner, I mean… Shit, people have been trying to close down the Eye for decades. If Maxwell couldn’t and Jimmy Goldsmith couldn’t… I mean, why would anyone bother trying to kill you?’

  ‘Did any of that make sense even to you?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Craig flapped one hand. ‘Mr Penfold and I have been in deep discussion most of the evening.’

  ‘Have you heard some of the things I’ve said about people? About fundamentalists in par-fucking-ticular?’

  ‘Fundamentalists don’t listen to your show.’

  ‘Khomeini didn’t read The Satanic Verses. So fucking what?’

  ‘Well, they don’t sound like fundamentalists, do they? White, man and woman, somebody called Danny.’

  ‘That I’ll give you.’ I put the dead joint into the ashtray. ‘They don’t sound like fundamentalist Muslims, anyway. Could be fundamentalist Christians; Aryan Nation militia types or something. They can�
�t all be wanking over pictures of Ayn Rand and polishing their Desert Eagles in South Dakota.’ My hand was still shaking. ‘Man, I really need a drink.’

  ‘I’ve got a box of red. Banrock okay?’

  ‘If it’s red and it has lots of alcohol in it, that’s all that matters.’

  Craig rose. ‘Sounds like your blood, pal.’

  ‘You ruddy sod. My jacket stank of whisky.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t see it lying there,’ I lied. ‘D’you still have it? I mean, you haven’t washed it or anything, have you?’

  ‘Exhibit A is in a bin-bag in my kitchen,’ Phil said. He paused. He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe you punched a woman.’

  ‘For the last time! I didn’t have a fucking choice!’

  ‘Well,’ Craig said. ‘As long as you didn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘About as much as I’m enjoying this,’ I muttered.

  Phil had picked Craig and me up on Saturday morning and taken us to the Temple Belle. I’d been worried what I might find there; I’d wanted reinforcements. Phil and Craig knew each other so well they frequently had great sport with my insecurities, telling me they were actually better friends with each other than they were with me. This time they didn’t do that but they ganged up and made me swear that if they helped me here, I’d report what had happened to the police on the Monday morning.