Angel on the Inside (41 page)

‘So I have to go and reassure him, because Hadyn Rees has a long memory and so has his computer. He's got everything to do with our early business on file, and that could damage me. Seriously. So I had to go and see him.'

She paused for breath. She was actually panting.

‘He was cited as co-respondent in your divorce,' I said.

‘How did you find that out?' she cracked back.

‘By accident, just like I found out your were fucking married before. I didn't know that until a month ago.'

‘I said, that was
before you
. Now is
with you
. Nothing else counts.'Her face showed a half-hearted smile. ‘You're jealous.'

‘And you're pushing it.'

‘Yes I am, because it's so fucking stupid.'

I knew it would all be my fault, but there was no stopping her now.

‘Think, man, for fuck's sake. You've seen the tape, you've seen what Hadyn Rees likes from women. He likes them to
sweat
. He does a bit of nominal bondage, that's true, but mostly he just likes to watch them sweat. He doesn't fuck them, he doesn't whip them, he doesn't verbally abuse them –
he's not even in the fucking room when it happens
. He records them and watches later at his convenience and creams his jeans in front of the video. Do you honestly think there could be anything between me and a so-solid perv like that? Do you think I did that willingly? I did it to get the file from his computer. That was all. It was a business stratagem, nothing more. That was the deal. I played his games and gave him my underwear – oh, yeah, he collects female underwear.

‘Just a minute. Where did you get this fucking tape.'

‘It was with the others,' I said.

‘Others?'

‘There were 16 in the house at Tregaron. He'd transferred the digital pictures from the camcorder on to his computer in some cases, but mostly they were video. He had a feed running through the wall into a VCR in the workshop.'

Amy put her hands back on her hips, looked at the floor and shook her head.

‘The fucker.'

I looked at her and, bizarrely, all I could think was that she was putting on a bit of weight.

‘Have you seen the end of this tape?' she said, looking back at me.

‘No, not the end,' I said nervously.

She grabbed the remote and fast forwarded to what I guessed was about the two hour mark. It took a few minutes. A few minutes of silence as she concentrated on the images flashing by. She was set on something, and it was like I wasn't there.

‘There!' she said triumphantly. ‘Watch this bit.'

There was Amy in her super-heated prison in Tregaron, chained to the radiator. There was Amy, skirt round her waist, suit jacket half-shrugged off her shoulders, her bra totally grey with sweat, her hair hanging in ribbons.

I didn't see the point. I hadn't watched this far because ... well, because it was obscene. It was revelling in someone's powerlessness.

And then suddenly there was Amy, head up and alert, listening.

‘I heard his car go,' she said, and her voice startled me. I had almost forgotten she was here, live, in the house.

On the screen, she waited, her head moving as if confirming something. Then she snapped the release button on the handcuffs – just like the Turner boys had done with me – and in an instant she was free and on her feet and marching towards the camera with a look on her face that would have frozen hell.

Then the tape went dark.

‘I took the memory disc out of the camera,' she said. ‘I didn't know the bastard had a video link-up.'

I eased my buttocks off the sofa and took out the tape I'd been sitting on.

‘And he made a copy so he could watch in the office.'

She didn't take it from me. She sank to the floor, cross-legged, and sat in silence.

‘Cigarette?' I asked her, producing a pack.

‘No, I've given up.'

That was news too.

‘I thought I was doing everything right. I got the company files off him, and then I thought I'd dealt with the camcorder,' she said, as if trying to work out where she'd gone wrong.

‘Are you sure you cleaned out the computer?' I asked.

‘Yes. I know what I'm doing there. The record's gone. He's got nothing anymore.' She looked up at me. ‘Where did you get the tapes?'

‘I had help.'

‘You said there were more.'

‘He used to hire girls to ... perform for him. Paid well, so I'm told.'

‘There's not that much money in the world.'

Her head sank down again.

‘I'm sure I've got the only ones with you, if that was the only time ...'

She flashed me a killer look.

‘Yes it was. And you know why I did it? Because it was the only way I could think of to protect
us
, what we have.'

I came out of the chair and put my arms round her.

‘I think you did a damn good job,' I said. ‘And it's over now. It's
then
, this is now.'

‘I knew he was a perv. I just thought he I could outsmart him.'

She looked me in the eyes and smiled. ‘You can't out-perv a perv, can you?'

I smiled back. ‘I've never met the geezer, but I could have told you he was a perv.'

‘Yeah, right, Mr Smart Arse.'

No, I could.

Malcolm ‘Creosote' Fisher had told me Rees was a ‘panty sniffer' when we were in Belmarsh.

Sole reason for going to Wales.

I wasn't going to have a panty sniffer threatening my wife.

The doorbell rang.

‘Who the fuck is that?' we both said together from the floor, arms around each other.

It was the so-solid perv himself.

 

Stupidly, we didn't check first, we just opened the door together, arms round each other's waists, me trying to confirm that she was adding a few ounces here and there.

We stopped giggling – it was a laughter of relief rather than anything specific – as the door swung open and there was Hadyn Rees.

He was dishevelled and unshaven and he had his hands in the pockets of a beltless raincoat with the two lower button fastened. He must have thought he was still in Wales.

‘I want to speak to Amy,' he said.

I just gawped at him, but then I'd never seen him before, not really.

He had once had curly blond hair, which was now thinning fast, and he was about five foot ten. He had the look of someone who needed to wear glasses, probably used contacts. In that raincoat, he looked like Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer in
The Ipcress File
, but without the glasses and with none of the charisma.

I said nothing. I was gobsmacked, thinking things like: of course he's here, he would have got bail. He was a solicitor, after all.

Amy said nothing, but I felt here grip on my waist tighten.

‘I want to talk to Amy alone,' he said. Why was he talking as if she wasn't right there in front of him? This guy had real problems with women.

‘Why?' I managed to say.

‘Because I love her and I want her to come away with me to a new life.'

I looked at him in disbelief.

Amy looked at him.

Amy looked at me and I looked at her.

‘You hold him, I'll hit him,' she said.

 

And that's what we did, right there on the front doorstep.

I did what Humphrey Bogart did to Elisha Wood Jnr in
The Maltese Falcon
. I got behind him before he could move and pulled the shoulders of his rain coat down over his arms so he was pinned helpless.

Personally, I was surprised that it worked, but it did. Then Amy hit him with the best left upper/right cross combination I had seen outside of pay-per-view TV.

He staggered backwards, taking me with him, and I felt him frantically trying to pull his right hand out of the raincoat pocket. I got there first and wrestled from him the Brocock air pistol he was trying to draw.

This one was an air pistol. It was a frighteningly accurate model of a Walther automatic. I knew that, because I could read Walther CP 88 along the four-inch barrel. It had a chestnut wood handle that fitted snugly into the palm of my hand and it had a safety catch. Beyond that, all I knew was that it wasn't one of Ion Jones's specials that fired real bullets. They were revolvers, not automatics.

Well, I was pretty sure.

‘He's got a gun,' I said as I struggled with him.

‘Here we go again,' said Amy, and she kicked him in the stomach.

 

I stood over him. It seemed a bit naff to point the air pistol at him. It was only an air pistol, after all. Humphrey Bogart would have tossed it into the sage brush and snarled at him.

I looked down at him as he gasped for breath.

‘Hadyn Rees? I don't believe we've met.'

He didn't answer, just concentrated on getting to his feet, and then stood there, panting.

I had moved back to be next to Amy, who was pumped up ready to have another go at him.

‘I don't think you've got any business here,' I said.

‘I'm not fucking finished with him,' said Amy.

‘Yes you are, because he simply doesn't matter any more.'

‘He doesn't?' she said quietly.

‘He never really did,' I said. ‘I just didn't see it that way for a while.'

Hadyn Rees spoke.

‘I've got nowhere to go.'

‘Tough,' I said.

‘My reputation's in ruins,' he said.

‘Double tough,' said Amy.

He didn't say anything else, he just turned on his heels and began walking down the drive, head down.

‘Let's see him off the premises,' I said.

Amy slipped her arm back around my waist, and we followed Rees until he'd left the drive and turned right along the street.

About 20 yards down the pavement there was a silvery Lexus, and he must have had a remote in his pocket, because the lights flashed as he unlocked it.

‘What do you think will happen to him?' Amy whispered.

‘As if I cared,' I said.

But suddenly I did care, because although he had unlocked the doors of the Lexus, he wasn't getting in it, he was opening the boot, and then he was leaning in and pulling something out that glinted in the streetlights.

‘Oh, no.'

This was a revolver, and I wasn't going to stop to ask if was a specially-adapted one. I should have known he'd have at least one in his collection. He was a model freak and a collector. He was bound to have.

And there he was, calmly cracking the cylinder and loading the thing from a box of ammunition he had balanced on the bumper of the car.

I had an air pistol. He had one too, but his fired real bullets.

‘Run,' I said to Amy. ‘Run for the house and lock the door. Now would be good.'

I knew I couldn't physically reach him in time. I had to shoot it out. But if he thought this was going to be some ten-paces-turn-and-fire duel, he was out of his fucking mind.

I'm not a bad shot, but I was outgunned from the start. I had to put my faith in local conditions and a lifetime's study of human behaviour. If I was wrong, that learning curve stopped here.

I raised the air pistol and made sure the safety was off. That was about all I was sure of. I didn't even know how many slugs the thing fired.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Hadyn Rees look at me in bewilderment, as he saw me aiming not at him, but, as it must have seemed to him, up into the night sky.

It took two shots to put out the nearest streetlight. Then three to put out the next.

Rees watched in wonderment, not understanding what I was doing, but then he didn't know Hampstead, did he?

Gunfire in the streets? No problem. Some vandal smashes a streetlight and – hey – the Neighbourhood Watch wakes up.

And they did by the time I'd smashed the third one. (Got it in one that time.)

Two houses set their burglar alarms off and a siren began to sound – that would be the Dunmores, I guessed. They would have the local police on speed dial.

I shot at a fourth lamp, but it was an ambitious distance and I missed.

By that time, though, there were lights coming on and somebody waving a torch and the obligatory ‘Clear off, you hooligans' being shouted.

Rees slammed the boot and dived for the driver's door.