Ballots, Blasts & Betrayal, page 15
‘There’s a room at the back that my dad calls the Chokey. He collects weird antique stuff, like thumbscrews and medieval tongue-tearers. My mum says it’s too creepy and won’t let him have it in the house.’
‘How far is Wally’s from here?’ Marion asked.
‘Ten to twelve minutes by car,’ Clare said.
‘What car?’ John pointed out, before looking at Marion. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Dirt bike. You’re heavy, but I could squeeze you on for a short ride.’
Clare shook her head. ‘The public part of the restaurant will be closed and the outside is all heavy metal doors and stuff. But if my dad’s crew are still drinking upstairs, they’ll let me in.’
‘Tricky, tricky,’ John mumbled to himself, as he gave a heavy sigh and glanced around. ‘We need a car for three people, and I need to shed my close protection team.’
Marion glanced over at Oluchi in the crowd of reporters.
‘There might be a way,’ she said.
39. A GUY GISBORNE PRODUCTION
00:21
Robin felt a slap on the cheek, then an overpowering smell that made him think he was in the old chicken sheds at Sherwood Outlet Mall. But this ammonia stench wasn’t from bird poop, it was a vial of smelling salts that Guy Gisborne had snapped under his nose.
‘Wakey, wakey, brat!’ Gisborne said.
Robin felt drowsy and nauseous. He realised he was lying on a cold tiled floor. His hands and ankles were tied with nylon fishing line that cut painfully into his skin, and the neck of his Vote Ardagh T-shirt had been ripped so that it hung off one shoulder.
As Robin blinked the blurriness out of his eyes, he saw Gisborne attaching a high-end mirrorless camera to a tripod.
‘I thought I’d record our early-morning fun,’ Gisborne purred. ‘I just had a home cinema put in my basement. I’ll invite my boys round to play back your painful death on a five-metre screen in ultra high definition.’
Once the camera was on the tripod, Gisborne turned it on, then tutted. The battery was dead.
‘That’s Clare,’ Gisborne snapped. ‘Borrows my good camera for A level art and brings it back with a flat battery.’
As Gisborne rummaged in his camera bag for another battery, Robin tried to roll sideways because his wrists were trapped under his back and his fingers were numb. But the tiniest movement made the tightly wound fishing line dig excruciatingly into his wrists.
Robin moaned.
‘You’re not so tough,’ Gisborne taunted. ‘Did you hear your daddy won the election? But even if his win holds up in court, I still own the cops, judges, school board and planning department. The only thing Sheriff Hood will be able to do in my town is cop the blame when his do-gooder plans go wrong.’
‘My dad’s smarter than you think,’ Robin said, trying to hide the strain in his voice.
‘Finally,’ Gisborne said as he found a working battery and clipped it to the camera.
Once he’d set the zoom and focus, Gisborne stood with his legs astride Robin. Then he put his hands under Robin’s armpits, swept him easily off the ground and hung him from a ceiling hook by the elastic at the back of his tracksuit bottoms.
‘Nice wedgie.’ Gisborne laughed as the oversized tracksuit bottoms stretched, leaving Robin dangling horizontally over the tiled floor.
Gisborne picked up a small sjambok whip and brought it down against Robin’s back with enough force to shred his T-shirt.
‘A little beauty, this one,’ Gisborne said, as Robin cried in pain. ‘Made from rhino skin over a hundred years ago for French colonial police, but still wonderfully effective.’
Robin didn’t want to show weakness but a tear streaked down his cheek, much to Gisborne’s amusement.
‘Crying after one lick!’ Gisborne smiled. ‘That was the first of hundreds. I’ve got an entire whip collection to try on you. By tomorrow you’ll be begging me to let you die.’
As Robin sobbed, Gisborne gave an excited jump, like a kid waiting for presents on Christmas Eve.
‘Breaking you will be fun,’ Gisborne said. He strode across the room and picked up Robin’s bow. ‘And since my face and this grotty room are the last things you’ll ever see, you’ll not be needing this again.’
Gisborne held Robin’s bow at one end, then swung it with all his might against the top of a battered metal workbench. The bow’s taut cable made a noisy ping, and the weapon’s carbon fibre body disintegrated into hundreds of pieces.
Gisborne clearly hadn’t realised that carbon fibre shattered on heavy impact. Robin turned his head and closed his eyes as shards of razor-sharp carbon flew in all directions. Since Gisborne was holding the bow, his face and torso caught most of the shards and he stumbled back, holding his face.
The biggest chunk of Robin’s bow spun off sideways, crashing into the tripod. This knocked Gisborne’s expensive camera against a side wall with enough force to snap off the lens at the weak spot where it joined the camera body.
‘Aaargh!’ Gisborne yelled, as he dived in to save the camera.
Robin hurt in ten places, but he still teased Gisborne. ‘You can put that in out-takes at the end of your movie.’
Gisborne turned to face Robin, his eyes furious and with carbon fibre shrapnel in his beard.
‘I’ll wipe off your smile, Hood,’ Gisborne growled, then grabbed the tripod with the broken camera on the end and swung it like a golf club, smashing Robin in the ribs.
Robin couldn’t breathe as the powerful blow lifted his body clean off the hook. With his wrists tied behind his back, he crashed to the hard floor, unable to protect his face. Pain shot through his body. Although even tiny movements were excruciating, instinct made him roll onto his side and pull his knees up to his chest.
As Gisborne roared with fury and staggered around looking through the debris for his sjambok, Robin felt a shard of carbon fibre digging into the back of his hand.
If he could turn his hand over, he might be able to pick it up. And if it was sharp, maybe it would cut the fine nylon fishing line that Gisborne had wound around his wrists . . .
40. VAN ON THE RUN
00:38
‘It’ll be a miracle if I don’t get fired for this,’ twenty-something reporter Oluchi said as she drove the orange Channel 9 news van around the side of Locksley town hall with Marion in the outside front passenger seat, Holly’s crib in the middle and Clare Gisborne in the back amidst racks of satellite transmission equipment, aluminium flight cases and Marion’s mud-splattered dirt bike.
‘You know like in the movies?’ Marion said, trying to make a joke to break the tension. ‘When the TV van goes under a low bridge and it tears the giant satellite dish off the roof?’
‘Channel 9 gives me a pension plan and six weeks’ paid leave,’ Oluchi said. ‘But maybe I’ll win a journalism award if we rescue Robin Hood . . .’
Then Oluchi hit the brakes hard enough for something heavy to fall off a rack in the rear compartment. As she stopped at the kerb, she saw Little John’s chunky shoulders squeezing through a window at the back of a gents toilet.
Clare opened the van’s sliding side door. John dropped from the window and jumped in, then Oluchi shot off, making the van’s tyres squeal.
‘Who knows where Wally’s is?’ Oluchi asked.
‘Left onto the 107, then turn off at junction six,’ Clare shouted from the back.
But left took them towards a little street market, where a hefty barricade had been built by shopkeepers and stallholders to stop looting. Oluchi had to reverse up the narrow lane, then she drove straight while Clare studied the map on her phone.
‘Next left if it’s clear,’ Clare said.
Marion saw cops at the side of the road, brandishing their stun batons over a bunch of drunk-looking students in Vote Ardagh T-shirts.
After ten minutes they had reached Wally’s, where they were pleased to see lights on upstairs and a parking lot with a row of the kind of fancy cars you can afford if you’re high up in Gisborne’s organisation.
The orange van with the Channel 9 news logo and a satellite dish on the roof wasn’t exactly discreet, so Oluchi parked it outside a betting shop a few doors down.
‘I’ll go inside with John,’ Clare said.
‘Leave your phone on speaker,’ Oluchi said.
‘Eh?’ John said.
‘Call me,’ Oluchi explained. ‘Then leave your phone on speaker and we should be able to hear what’s going on.’
‘Clever,’ Marion said as she pulled her holstered pistol over her head. ‘One of you had better take this as well.’
‘I’ve only held a gun, like, twice,’ John said.
‘My dad used to take me to the shooting range,’ Clare said. She took the gun, expertly removed the clip, checked the chamber, then shoved the weapon in her trouser pocket. ‘My dad’s crew won’t dare search me.’
‘Be safe,’ Oluchi warned as they set off.
As they got close to Wally’s sliding glass doors, John called Oluchi, put his phone on speaker and slid it into his jacket pocket.
The restaurant’s metal grilles were down, but there were two women inside polishing the leather booths and a guy at the bar unloading racks of steaming glassware from a commercial dishwasher.
‘Closed for tonight,’ one of the women yelled, wagging a finger as Clare neared the door.
‘I’m Clare, Clare Gisborne,’ she said, as John noticed a flash of orange indicator lights behind him. He looked around and saw a guy in a leather jacket unlocking a little BMW coupe.
‘Miss Gisborne,’ the guy emptying the dishwasher said, sprinting to unlock the door. ‘Sorry, sorry! What’s the matter? Why are you kids out so late?’
As dishwasher guy unlocked the restaurant, John half-watched the man in the leather jacket struggling to load two large roll bags into the BMW. Given the reputation of Gisborne’s gang, he wondered if it was a body sawn in half.
‘I dropped by to see my dad before I went back to school,’ Clare explained.
Dishwasher guy shook his head. ‘I’ve not seen Mr Gisborne today. I’m not sure where he is.’
‘Really?’ Clare said, acting confused. ‘Could my dad have come in the back way or something? I was told he’d be here.’
The man pointed past the bar to an open kitchen. ‘Front or back, there’s only one set of stairs to the top room. I would have seen him.’
‘Right,’ Clare said uncertainly. ‘Crossed wires, I guess. Are the guys still drinking upstairs? I can’t get my dad’s mobile, but one of them might know where we can find him.’
‘Go ahead and ask,’ the guy said.
Clare led John up narrow stairs with knackered green carpet. There was a push button lock on the door at the top, but Clare knew the code. She stepped into a cosy bar with a pool table and two dartboards. Four of Gisborne’s top guys stood around a well-stocked bar where the customers served themselves.
There was cigar smoke in the air and a joke going down, but the unnerving presence of the boss’s daughter and her boyfriend killed the banter.
‘I thought I was meeting my dad here,’ Clare said awkwardly, as she tried to remember the names of her dad’s cronies. ‘With everything going nuts, we must have got our wires crossed. And I can’t get through to his phone.’
‘Starkey knows where the boss is,’ a guy Clare was pretty sure was called Roger said. ‘He came in and picked up some stuff that the boss wanted from the Chokey.’
‘If Starkey can squeeze it in that stupid little car of his,’ another guy said, earning laughs from his mates.
‘Chokey?’ John said. ‘Like in the book Matilda? The place where the headmistress sends kids to be punished?’
The four guys shrugged and looked at each other, like they’d never read a book in their lives.
‘The boss collects some wild stuff,’ a guy holding a huge glass of brandy said. ‘It’s not locked. Stick your head in and have a butcher’s.’
The guy pointed John to a door, and he went to look.
The Chokey was a windowless storage area about eight metres by five. The walls were lined with illuminated glass cabinets. Inside were all sorts of horrible pointy things for tearing, gouging and chopping bits off human bodies, while Gisborne’s whip collection ran the entire length of the back wall.
‘Is Starkey around?’ Clare said to the guys at the bar. ‘He must know where my dad is.’
As John stepped further into the Chokey, he realised that this wasn’t Gisborne’s torture chamber, but the place where Gisborne used his creepy collection to impress friends, or intimate enemies. He also noticed that a lot of the whips were missing from their hooks, and one was on the floor, as if someone had grabbed them in a hurry.
‘You just missed Starkey,’ the brandy-drinker said.
‘Cherry-red BMW coupe,’ John said, hoping that Marion and Oluchi could hear on speakerphone as he stepped back into the bar area. ‘I think I saw him putting stuff in the car as we arrived.’
Clare gave a fake yawn and looked at John. ‘I’m beat, and it sounds like my dad’s busy. I’m gonna head home and sleep.’
‘We’ll let your dad know you were looking for him if he calls,’ Roger said. ‘Have you got a ride?’
‘My driver’s waiting,’ John said, as Clare headed for the exit.
‘Do you think those guys know my dad’s got Robin?’ Clare whispered as the pair rushed down the stairs.
‘Maybe,’ John said.
They hurried through the restaurant. John pulled out his phone the instant they were in the night air.
‘How much did you hear?’ John asked Oluchi, as the young reporter reversed the satellite truck to the edge of Wally’s car park.
‘Enough to know that I need to follow a red BMW,’ Oluchi answered. John and Clare sprinted towards the van.
‘Lucky for us, Starkey took ages getting all the stuff in his car and setting his satnav,’ Marion added. ‘He turned towards the centre of town. If he sticks to the main road and Oluchi puts her foot down, we should be able to catch him up.’
41. CHERRY-RED COUPE
00:57
Oluchi took a risk, running a red light and catching the BMW coupe at the next junction. They were cruising in the dark, passing rows of identical abandoned apartment blocks that had once housed workers at Locksley’s auto plants.
‘Starkey can’t be going far if he’s not taking the highway,’ Clare noted.
The trouble was, at one in the morning there was no traffic, and Starkey would surely realise he was being followed by a bright orange van with a dish on the roof. Oluchi stayed back as far as she dared, but they lost the BMW when it came off the main road and took a couple of quick turns.
‘Now what?’ Oluchi grumbled, thumping her steering wheel as she stopped at a T-junction. ‘Left or right? It’s a fifty-fifty chance.’
‘And Robin dies if we get it wrong,’ John said.
‘Dirt bike,’ Marion blurted, looking at John and Clare in the back. ‘We’ll split up.’
Clare opened the van’s back door. John’s strength came in handy as he easily lifted Marion’s bike out.
‘Keep an eye on Holly,’ Marion yelled, straddling the bike as van doors slammed.
Oluchi went left, so Marion took a right, and found herself passing a strip of auto workshops and dodgy second-hand car dealerships. After those, the road narrowed to a cobbled lane, with moonlight catching the Macondo River at the far end.
She’d entered the oldest part of Locksley’s docks. The industrial buildings had been laid out in narrow alleyways in the days when cargo arrived on sail barges. Most were in a shocking state of repair and some were burnt out, leaving only a brick shell.
At this time in the morning, the area was a creepy maze. There were dozens of alleyways between buildings, though luckily for Marion most were too narrow for Starkey’s BMW.
Riding over cobbles was jarring, and Marion felt sure she’d wasted her time when she hit a waterfront path, separated by a line of bollards too tight for a car to pass through. But as she turned the bike around, headlights lit up a passageway between two buildings as a car sped down the alleyway at its far end.
The passage gave less than ten centimetres’ clearance for Marion’s handlebars, so she had to take it slow. By the time she reached the end, she could only see the car’s vanishing rear lights.
Marion hadn’t seen enough to identify the red coupe, but the engine’s roar suggested a sporty car. And since there was no reason to drive down here unless you were dropping something off, Marion decided it was better to try and work out where the car had been, rather than chase it.
She twisted her handlebars slowly, turning the dirt bike’s headlamp into a searchlight and scanning the narrow alleyway, with hulking brick buildings on either side.
Marion slowly rode back where the car had come from. At the end of this alleyway, she found herself on a broad stretch of riverfront. There were a couple of burnt-out cars, a dock where two barges had rusted until they sank, and colonies of birds perched on abandoned dock cranes.
As she aimed her headlight along the dockside, it lit up a tatty beige estate car. It looked like the one Agnes had been sitting on before Robin was captured – and it made sense that Gisborne would have used it, because she’d slashed the tyres of his Mercedes.
‘Robin’s close,’ Marion told herself.
She assumed Gisborne wouldn’t have wanted to carry Robin any further than he had to, which meant they’d likely be in one of two identical warehouse buildings closest to the parked car. These waterfront buildings were shabby, but in better shape than the ones in the alleyways behind.
Both were four storeys tall, with facades stretching fifty metres along the river. Part of their original frontage had been knocked out and replaced with a glass lobby.
Marion switched the bike’s headlight off, then rolled it back into the alleyway. As she pulled out her phone, she felt anxious.
32% battery and five signal bars. Yay!
But as she scrolled through her contacts, Marion had the horrible realisation that she’d split from the others in a hurry, and she didn’t have a number for John, Clare or Oluchi.
