She looked thoughtful. She didn’t look mad or angry. She didn’t look sad either. “There will always be another young woman murdered, Alec. There will always be another big case. I don’t blame you. I just can’t spend my life alone anymore.”
“We’ll talk later. I have to brief the team on the forensic results. As soon as the briefing is over I’ll come straight home and we can talk, yes?” He kissed her forehead and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Her eyes seemed glazed and there was a faraway look to them. She was already gone. She had been gone for a long time.
When Jessie opened his eyes, he was in his armchair. His hands and feet were tied with thick black duct tape and he couldn’t move. A slim built man in his fifties was sitting across the room from him on the settee. He was wearing faded blue jeans and white trainers. His skin was dark and wrinkled by the sun and his stubble greyed by age.
“Where is Rose?” Jessie croaked. Blood tricked down his neck from his left ear. The beating had burst the stitches. “What have you done to her?”
“She’s with friends of mine. They’re looking after her.” The man said. His voice was thick and his accent guttural. Jessie knew he was from the Oguzhan family.
“Don’t hurt her. She has nothing to do with this, you bastard!” Tears filled Jessie’s eyes. This was his worst nightmare come true. He loved Rose, but he was helpless. Anger and frustration boiled inside him.
“You lost something that was valuable to us. Now we have something that is precious to you. When you return our property, we will return your wife to you. Does that seem fair to you?”
“I didn’t lose your drugs. They were stolen.”
“They were in your care. You lost them.”
“I don’t know who took them. How can I return them? I don’t know who took them.”
“I suggest you find out.” The man pointed a nicotine-stained finger at him.
“How can I?” Jessie tried to move, but the Turk had fastened him tightly. Pins and needles were creeping from his feet up his legs.
“It was an inside job?”
“It must be. They knew the code to the safe.”
“Who knew the code?” The Turk stood up and took out a cigarette. He put the packet back into the pocket of his grey leather bomber jacket. It looked too big for him and the sleeves covered his hands so that only his fingers showed.
“Me and Sally, that’s it.” A trickle of blood ran over his collarbone and tickled his skin. “No one knew about the safe beneath the ice machine except us.”
“Have you heard from Salim?” The Turk sucked on the filter and swallowed the smoke.
“No. Not for nearly two weeks.”
“When did you last talk to him?”
“The week before last.” Jessie tried to remember the exact day, but couldn’t. He drank with his customers most nights and the mornings were usually a haze.
“What did you speak about?” The Turk narrowed his eyes.
“I don’t know, work stuff,” Jessie moaned. He was in pain and panicking about Rose. He knew the Turks would kill her sooner than he could blink. It was their way.
“What stuff, Jessie?” He pushed. “It is very important to your wife that we recover our property.”
“Don’t hurt her!” Jessie shouted and saliva sprayed from his lips as they quivered. If he could free his hands, he would throttle the Turk to death. Jessie was losing it and he raised his voice again. “Work stuff, for God’s sake. Beer orders, cellar stocks, how many fucking peanuts we had left, does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters.” The Turk paused for a moment. “Was Salim alone?”
“When?”
“When you last spoke to him.”
“Yes, but…” Jessie paused. “He was in a rush. He said he had someone waiting in the car.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, his girlfriend maybe. Does any of that matter?”
“Obviously not to you, maybe that’s why you gave away our property?” The Turk leaned closer and his eyes were dark and cold.
“Drugs!” Jessie shouted. “Stop saying property like you’re businessmen working hard for a living. Someone walked into your nightclub and stole your fucking drugs. They cut my ears off to get into your safe where Salim kept them.”
The Turk stayed quiet for a moment. Jessie was becoming irrational because of the pain. “Only you and Salim knew that the safe was under the ice machine?” He lowered his voice to try to calm the Welshman down.
“Yes. The robbers didn’t know the code to that one. That’s why they cut my ears off,” Jessie stressed. “I refused to tell them the code and they cut off my fucking ear. When I refused again they cut off the other one.”
“But you told them the code in the end, yes?”
“What else could I do?” Jessie shouted and tears rolled down his face. “They were cutting my ears off! I tried, I really did.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe you could have tried harder.” The Turk blew smoke from his nostrils and turned away from Jessie. “Nobody else in that room could have known about the drugs?”
“No. Not unless Sally told them.” Jessie was saying what he had thought all along. Salim was missing and the drugs were gone. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He must have told someone the drugs were there. Jessie was a lot of things, but disloyal or stupid were not amongst them. He had hated Salim keeping smack in the club, but he would never have told anyone they were there, not even Rose. Especially not Rose.
“Are you insinuating that Salim betrayed his family for five kilos of cocaine?” The Turk turned quickly and leaned over Jessie. He sneered in his face. “He’s a wealthy man, why would he steal from his family?”
“How else could they have known about the safe?” Jessie said sheepishly. He didn’t want to upset the Turk anymore than he had already. He wanted Rose back safe and then they were out of this game for good. Things were getting out of hand and they were getting too old.
“How else could they have known, Jessie? That is why I’m here, to find out. You do not understand how we work. Salim is a grandchild of our Baba. They would die for each other before they would betray each other’s trust.”
“I know all that shit, but no one else knew about the drugs, I swear they didn’t.”
“Did you know Salim has a wife and children?” The Turk smiled for the first time, but there was no warmth in it.
“Yes, I’ve seen pictures of them.” Jessie nodded and bolts of pain shot through his brain. His painkillers were wearing off.
“They live in Turkey most of the time, you know?”
“I know.”
“Did you know that they were here visiting?” The Turk raised his eyebrows.
“No, he didn’t mention it.”
“His grandfather brought them over in an attempt to stop Salim fucking around so much,” the Turk shook his head in disgust. “His generation have no respect for family values.”
“I didn’t know they were here.”
“If Salim betrayed us, then his family would be slaughtered in front of him and buried in the sand.” The Turk smiled again and shrugged. That was just the way it was.
“He must have told the men that robbed the club,” Jessie sighed. He had no other explanation.
“He would not risk his family. If he was in on the robbery, then why didn’t he give them the safe code and let them take the drugs when the club was empty?” The Turk relaxed and pulled on his cigarette again.
“I don’t know. That bit doesn’t make sense. They knew the combination for the floor safe where the stake money was.”
“Which only contained the poker money, right?”
“Right.” Jessie nodded.
“Then it is obvious.” The Turk walked to the window.
“Not to me it isn’t.” Jessie shook his head and then wished he hadn’t. Pain flashed through his head. “I don’t get it.”
“You said the men knew the safe code already?”
“Yes. They asked me for it and I refused. I gave them the wrong code to make them set the alarms off, but they knew it was a trick and they cut my ear off.”
“Because they knew the real code?”
“Yes.” Jessie was confused.
“We will assume Salim gave them that code for now. Men that cut ears off can be very persuasive. There is only one way they got that information from Salim.” He looked at Jessie and stroked the bristles on his chin. “He’s missing.”
“You think they tortured him?” Jessie felt sick. What did they do to him to make him talk? “Oh Jesus, I didn’t think of that.”
“What happened next?”
“Then they asked me for the other code and I refused. They cut my other ear off.”
“Then what?”
“Then I was bleeding on the floor and the others said they would square things with you if I gave them the code.”
“Who said that?” The Turk raised his eyebrows.
“Why?” Jessie hesitated. He hadn’t mentioned that Leon and Jinx said they would speak to the Turks. Now he wasn’t sure if should have said anything at all.
“Who said they would square things with us if you gave them the code?”
“I can’t remember who said it. I was hurt and bleeding,” Jessie lied, and the Turk could sense that he was protecting someone.
“You know some of my friends like British women very much. I’m sure they would like your wife if I introduced them to her.” He didn’t smile but he looked amused as realisation hit Jessie. “She’s hardly in a position to say no, is she?”
“You bastard!” Jessie struggled against his binds. “If you lay one finger on her, I’ll kill you!”
“Will you?” The Turk stubbed the cigarette out on the fireplace leaving an ugly black smudge on the lacquered wood. “I doubt it. Who told you that they would square it with us if you gave them the drugs?”
Jessie closed his eyes and sighed. He had no choice. “Leon Tanner and Jinx Cotton, but they didn’t mean anything by it. They meant that they would tell you the drugs were stolen, and I gave them the code because they tortured me.”
“They said that they would square things with us, if you gave them our drugs, yes?”
“Yes, but–”
“But nothing, Jessie. I want to know who robbed the club. I want to know where Salim and his family are, and someone from that room knows the answers. Your friends persuaded you to give up our drugs. Now they owe you for that.”
“They are not my friends. Look, they’re not going to give me that kind of money. They meant they would tell you what happened, that’s all!” Jessie whined. He wished he hadn’t said anything.
“You have forty-eight hours to return our property or come up with the equivalent amount of cash, plus the information that I require. If you don’t, I’ll give your wife to the men to play with before they bury you both in concrete. Do you understand me?”
Jessie nodded his head slowly and stared into space as the Turk cut him free. A tear ran from his eye and mingled with the blood from his ear.
“Salim and his children are very valuable to my employer, very valuable indeed, understand?” The Turk squeezed his cheeks together painfully. “Forty-eight hours, Jessie.”
The Gecko had had a career as a military intelligence officer. He was a recognized expert in the fields of human intelligence, strategic interrogation, special operations, and special survival training for the military. He had been one of the most effective and prolific interrogators in the Department of Defence. He had served as an interrogator and senior advisor to a special operations task force during the operations Just Cause, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom. He had begun as a normal family man with a career in the military, but that had soon changed. He had become an intelligence expert with a family somewhere at home that he didn’t see. His work had taken him all over the world, and over time, it had eroded his morals and numbed his emotions. When he returned home on leave, he was cold and distracted. He had nothing in common with his wife or his teenage son anymore and he spent his time at home working on his laptop or locked in his study whispering down the telephone in Arabic. He had travelled on more than twenty extraordinary rendition flights to over a dozen countries. During the ‘war on terror’, normal extradition had been useless and more extreme methods had been needed to extract information from terrorist sympathisers. Enemy suspects had been kidnapped, stripped, given an enema and drugged. Intelligence officers had then bundled them onto an unscheduled flight to a country where torture was an acceptable means of extracting information, and then they had been questioned. The Gecko had been classed as an advisor.
At first, Gecko had advised the foreign interrogators. He would compile the questions for them to ask, and make an educated decision as to whether the answers given were the truth. Information gleaned under torture was often inaccurate. As time went by, he had become more involved in the interrogation process, developing new torture techniques and discarding the ones which didn’t work. Eventually the subjects had become nothing more than experiments to him. Their pain and fear had no impact on him. Their screams and pleas for mercy were part of the job. They were no longer humans, and deep inside, neither was he. There were doors in his brain which had closed and never opened again.
When he left the military, he found it difficult to adjust to civilian life. Some of his victims haunted his dreams. Foreign regimes still paid him thousands of pounds for advice on interrogation and training, but he couldn’t remember the person he was outside of the military. The man who had married his wife and fathered a baby boy was gone forever. He couldn’t find any paternal instincts inside himself and his relationship with his wife had gone. She had begun drinking heavily while he was serving abroad and her dependency deepened when he left the service. Wine at first, but then whisky and vodka replaced Merlot and Shiraz. When she drank, she argued with him. She ridiculed him about his prowess in the bedroom. They rarely had sex and when they did, it was quick and mechanical, which left her frustrated and unsatisfied. She felt as if she had wasted her life while he had lived his in the army. Her youth was gone and she resented his career. Now he was retired, but he still wasn’t interested in his family. All those years waiting for him to come home had been fruitless. Her resentment turned to anger and hatred. As her drinking worsened, her mental health deteriorated and she turned to drugs. Prescription drugs at first. She swallowed Valium, Prozac and an assortment of painkillers. When her doctor refused to increase her dosage, she found a street dealer who was happy to supply her with whatever she wanted. Her dealer could get his hands on anything she wanted as long as she had the money. The problem was she ran out of money. She began to steal her husband’s cash cards, but he noticed that money was going missing and he put a stop to it. He cancelled her credit cards and did all the shopping himself in an effort to wean her off the drink and drugs. She sold her jewellery and pawned anything of value to buy her drugs, but eventually she ran out of options. One day after begging her supplier for Valium, he offered her alternative methods of payment, and she began having sex with him and some of his clients in exchange for drugs. It wasn’t long before she was chasing the dragon to blot out the memories of the men who had used her body. The more vile memories she had, the more heroin she needed. The combination of booze and drugs made her aggressive and violent at home. Her anger turned towards her husband and their son, Nate.
Nate junior was sixteen when his father left the forces, and he was looking forward to spending more time with his dad. Nate was a keen sportsman and a good footballer. He played for a local youth team in a Sunday league. His ambition was to score the winner with his dad watching on the touchline, but it was not an ambition he would achieve. When he left the intelligence services, his father showed no interest in his son and he seldom spoke to him. Nate felt his father was a stranger to him and his mother. He could see his mother was going downhill. She looked high as a kite most of the time and Nate started to notice bruises on her arms and legs. He suspected his father was hitting her, but he could not have been further from the truth. The bruises were from the men that abused her body in payment for her drugs. Nate decided to ask his mother if she was being beaten: this was the first time his mother ever slapped him, and he was shocked. His parents were not perfect but they had never hit him.
He had no idea why she had hit him and the next day when he asked her about it she blushed and apologised. She said she couldn’t remember it. Three hours later, she was paralytic and she launched a dinner plate at him which missed his head by inches. When his father heard the smash, he came out of his study to investigate the noise. He looked at his wife and studied her with a blank expression on his face.
“What’s wrong with her?” Nate asked his father. “She’s behaving really strangely.”
“She’s taking opiates,” his father replied. He had seen the signs of drug abuse for years. Her pupils were tiny black dots and she could hardly speak sometimes. Many of his interrogation subjects were drugged with opiates to make them talk. He could recognise it a mile away.
“What do you mean, Dad?” Nate asked.
“Your mother is using heroin, Nate.”
“I don’t believe you.” Nate shook his head in disbelief.
“I’ll deal with her,” Gecko said in a strange monotone voice. Nate couldn’t tell what his father did next, but it looked like he applied a type of wristlock. He led his wife upstairs with the same blank stare in his eyes, and although she struggled, she couldn’t resist the lock. Nate never saw her alive again.