Gatecrasher (4 page)

He ran the tap until the water ran very cold and sipped from the glass before taking larger swallows. Seconds after finishing the glass his mouth felt dry again and his stomach was turning. The thirst was worse than the nausea he decided and drank another glass down in three big gulps.

S
tepping into the hall he looked one way toward the kitchen at one end and then looked the other way toward his gloomy bedroom and the lounge on the opposite side.

Even from here he could see mess everywhere and the smell of it once again assailed his sensitive nostrils.
Campbell
closed his eyes and turned back to the bathroom and shower.

After showering he felt as if a stiff layer of filth had been rinsed away and his clean clothes smelt fresh and felt like it. As prepared as he could be Campbell now set about trying to rid his flat of all the evidence of the night before, throwing open windows to chase out the stale stink of tobacco and alcohol.

A
s he worked, flashes of the evening replayed in his mind but bigger chunks were missing now than last night and he found himself every so often pausing from one chore or another and staring blankly at the wall trying to summon up memories.

The blonde girl. She’d been a looker he thought. Or at least had seemed so at the time. Maybe that was the drink though, impairing his judgement. Certainly it had impaired it enough for him to empty so many glasses down his throat. To mix his drinks. Wine, beer, Tequila. He could still taste sambuca somehow, though could only barely recall sinking one shot of that.  Had there been anything else?

Dropping empty beer cans and wine bottles into black refuse sacks he wondered how much of these he had been responsible for. There were so many. Then his stomach lurched again and he tried not to think about how much he’d drunk at all.

H
aving woken late he noted that the time was now getting on for three in the afternoon. The kitchen would wait no longer and he moved gingerly to the door, pausing there with his hands on the doorframe, that same invisible barrier holding him back as it had the previous night. The scene before him was a stark and vivid reminder of what had taken place.

An hour later, the kitchen as clean as he had ever seen it, he was back in bed again. The headache, the nausea and the black mood that refused to lift could all be avoided in sleep he reasoned, so he crawled back under the duvet and slowly drifted off.

For two hours he slept as the daylight crept out of the room, as a jumble of images, real and created, tumbled through his mind, as the phone rang unanswered in the other room and an officious male voice droned out a message for Daniel Campbell.

When he awoke he felt no better. The pounding in his temples had grown more insistent and his tongue felt as thick and dry as before. His dreams had been confused and disturbing and though the images faded quickly when he opened his eyes, they had already set his mood low and morose.

Pulling on his dressing gown, not bothering even to dress properly now, he wandered back into the kitchen to fill another glass of water to rinse the persistent thirst. He left the light off though, as if afraid that he might see something he didn’t want to, as if something might have come back.
Campbell
shuffled through to the living room, hand on his somersaulting stomach, frown on his face. As if this wasn’t bad enough already, Monday was looming now and with it the grind of work. His spirits sank further with this thought.

His employer was a respected research company operating in the retail investment industry. Offering independent assessment and analysis of the many different investment funds available to the public the company had large numbers of staff whose job it was to constantly research and monitor different funds and fund managers in the industry.
Campbell
was one of those people.

Sometimes he enjoyed it, digging around for information on investment houses or individual fund managers and their teams of analysts or occasionally the companies in which they invested, the stocks they bought, the different sectors. Dissecting the numbers, the patterns they formed. Sometimes it was something to get his teeth into, cutting through all the spiel and the salesmanship and gloss to the facts and figures and trends beneath.

M
ostly though,
Campbell
found himself regularly bored. He read through pages of dull figures and financial reports, fund portfolios, profits and loss and pages and pages of charts and graphs. The columns of figures and the bars and lines often became meaningless shapes and colours and patterns. The meetings with people trying to convince him and his colleagues that everything in their company or their fund was positive and wonderful and up, up, up often became an exercise in chewing back his yawns.

His growing frustration was compounded by his utter inability to decide what else he might want to do with his life instead. The money was decent and the work well within his capability and it was all so…
safe. He knew that was pathetic though and often he yearned to escape the tedium.

Turning on the television, he began to jump channels impatiently, finding nothing that held his interest for more than a few minutes. Then an advert for mobile phones caught his attention as he flicked channels again and he lazily placed the tea and the remote control down on the floor in front of him, looked around the room for his own mobile and spotted it across the room. Drawing himself up from the sofa he walked across to the corner of the room where his telephone sat on a small stand and his mobile next to it.

Three missed calls.

His answerphone also displayed a large glowing red 1 on its tiny display.

First checking the mobile phone he found that two of the calls had been the automatic call-back function that let him know he had messages, of which, there was in fact just one.

‘Mr Campbell. This is Michael Bellamy from the hospital. I’m just ringing this number too in case you missed the message on your home phone number but it is very, very important that you call me as soon as you can.’ And he left a number.

Campbell
slapped at the playback button on his answering machine, his fingernails digging into the palms of his hands as he clenched them tight whilst the electronic voice crawled through the introduction and time of message.

Before the message finished playing, Campbell was already dashing through his flat to the toilet where finally he threw up and then threw up again, the hospital administrator’s voice echoing through his head.

Monday
.
7.30am.

Julius Warren picked up a paper napkin from the table and wiped the egg yolk from his chin. Around the table Stuart Keane and Keith Slater – the rest of
Gresham
’s crew
–
sat quietly finishing their own breakfasts.

Keane placed a crisp ten pound note on the table and then found a five in his wallet and placed that on top.

‘I’ve got these,
’ he said, his voice noticeably deeper than its usual pitch.

‘Chee
rs,
’ said Slater.
Warren
only grunted his thanks. ‘What’s the time?’ asked Slater and belched quietly into his hand.

The polite gesture seemed out of place from a man whom the others knew to be a very dangerous individual in the right
–
or wrong
–
circumstances. The man was full of contradictions.

‘Too fucking early,
’ growled Keane.

Slater regarded him coldly. He had made no secret of his contempt for the way Keane had handled the situation on Saturday night and had made it clear to him that was the way he felt.

‘It’s half seven,
’
Warren
said as he tugged his sleeve back over his wrist. ‘Guess we should get cracking on round two.’

‘George knows we’ve already looked doesn’t he?’ asked Keane, determined not to let Slater intimidate him.

Warren
had long thought that the younger man had a cruel and ambitious streak that made him so competitive that he might create a problem for them. That one day, in his haste to impress the rest of them,
Gresham
especially, he would slip up. And so he had.

The defiant look on Keane’s face now told him that he wasn’t about to admit to it though. Perhaps they’d miscalculated this, misjudged Keane.

Warren
was nodding his head. ‘Yeah. But Slater spoke to him after me, once he’d calmed down,’ he said and nodded toward the big man. ‘Decided that it would’ve looked too dodgy to keep snooping around on a Sunday, especially once the rain started like that. We aren’t going to find him today, but we need to find out where he got to.’

‘I s’pose. So where do we kick off then?’ said Keane.

He already knew what they would be doing but he was probably trying to sound breezy, as if he wasn’t bothered by Slater’s sneering, as if he wasn’t going to blame himself for the situation even if the others did. He ignored another look from Slater although
Warren
could see his irritation rising alrea
dy.  ‘Back to where we left him,
’ Slater said before
Warren
cou
ld answer. ‘Back to square one.’

A
n hour later they stood in a small alleyway staring at a section of the wall. Blood streaked across the top of the wall and splashed around the floor at their feet had caught their attention. Kane insisted that there had been much more, that the downpour the day before must have washed it away.

They all stood peering over the wall into the garden beyond.

‘He went in there. Must have,
’ said Slater trying to see between the small gap in the curtains of the nearest window.

‘
Yeah but to get help? Call the Bill? Hide?’ said
Warren
.

‘Not the Bill or we’d have heard by now. Maybe to get help but that would probably have meant Old Bill again so probably to hide. In which case w
e may never hear from him again,
’ reasoned Slater. ‘In which case, we’d better get moving. Make sure whoever lives here is at work or whatever and check the place out.’

‘What if they aren’t at work?’ asked
Warren
.

Slater turned back and stared over the wall but he didn’t say anything and
Warren
didn’t press him.

Monday
.
9.30am.

The offices of Griffin Holdings Ltd stood gleaming in glass and steel alongside The Great West Road in Hammersmith. Ten stories high it stood not much taller than the small church next door but still made the older building look quaint and out of place in the changing environment.

G
riffin Holdings Ltd occupied the top three floors of the building and had done so for almost four years. In that time, its Chief Executive, Andrew Griffin, had carefully rebuilt the company from the floundering mess he had found it in, back into a formidable reflection of its former glory. It traded now on the slogan that reflected its reputation:
“
anything, anytime, anywhere
”
.

When he had assumed control of the operation it had just lost its two founding partners and figureheads, and with it its name and thus its identity.
Griffin
had been forced to take a robust approach to restructuring the company – with the departure of the previous owners contracts had been lost and as a result income was a dwindling commodity. Parts of the operation had become redundant and were starting to make losses rather than profit.

He had made difficult, unpleasant decisions that put men out of jobs; men who had been loyal to the company for many years and who left behind them close friends with whom Griffin knew he would still have to work and would have much to do to win over.

Property had been sold to raise cash but this had proved the easiest part of the rebuilding process as the property market remained high and they were able to realise some excellent returns on holdings that had been bought near the bottom of the market.
Griffin
had been lauded for this move which had at once streamlined an operation that was beginning to look decidedly flabby and inefficient and placed the balance sheet firmly back in the black.

That had been a simple way to finish his first year at the helm with the accounts looking deceptively favourable but the second year had been the struggle. The long hours and hard slog to win contracts against the fiercest of competition in a tightening marketplace, watching some of that effort come to nothing when they were awarded elsewhere. Trying hard to motivate an increasingly demoralised workforce with little cause for optimism.
Griffin
had had to take a very public pay cut in order to force through a salary freeze that year.