The Drop

back to speak.
    ‘Am I?’ he asked ‘what do you reckon? Do you think Finney will come after me with his nail gun?’ he laughed and so did his Russians.
    ‘You won’t be fucking laughing when he does,’ I said and they hauled me to my feet.
    ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he said, ‘come on!’
    Two of them picked me up, their big hands wedged under my armpits. They moved so fast I was being dragged along, the tips of my shoes scraping against the concrete as I was propelled to the other end of the room. They were still laughing, in obvious high spirits, sure of themselves. The door up ahead was wooden and they used my head to barge it open, rattling my teeth and stunning me in the process. Inside was a smaller room, which contained a little row of offices to one side.
    It was pitch dark, so they flicked on the light in the first office to illuminate the scene. At first I could barely register what it was. It looked like some big animal had been mangled at an abattoir. Then it hit me with a sudden shock of realisation and I knew, just knew, that we were lost. There was no hope for any of us.
    It was Finney - or what was left of him when the Russians had all had their fun. His eyes were open wide and staring back at me but there was no life left in them. His face had been mutilated with what looked like a serrated knife, and the flesh around the wounds was red and swollen and puffed up like he had taken a hell of a beating. His hands and legs had been fastened to the big metal chair with handcuffs around each wrist and ankle. Someone had had the foresight to cement the chair into the ground beforehand because they knew from his reputation how hard he would have fought. Christ, how he would have struggled to get at them.
    It looked like he had been tortured to death at first but then I noticed the ligature around his neck, which had bitten tightly into the skin. They’d finished him off with some sort of wire garrotte. It explained the open, sightless eyes that I couldn’t tear my gaze from. Someone had calmly stood behind him and tightened it round his neck until Finney finally choked to death.
    I was sick on the floor then.
    ‘Pick him up,’ ordered Gladwell and I was dragged up by my arms again and taken along to the next room. This one looked like an abandoned walk-in fridge, with all of the racking taken out. They turned the light on.
    ‘As you can see, we’ve been busy,’ Gladwell told me. Northam was easier to recognise. They’d not messed him up nearly as much as Finney. Our bent accountant looked the same as usual in fact, except for the bullet hole in his forehead. They’d done him just like they did Geordie Cartwright. ‘And it’s still early,’ Gladwell reminded me, ‘after all, we’ve got all night.’
    ‘What do you want from me?’ I managed to ask, my voice a low rasp.
    ‘I’m not sure now. When I ordered you to be picked up we didn’t have the full picture but it looks like I’ve already got what I need. The accountant, Northam, he was very keen to cooperate, once we showed him what we’d done to Finney. We didn’t have to hurt him at all, though we hurt him a bit anyway to make sure he was telling the truth. He told us all about the business, filled in the gaps for us. By the time the lads picked you up we had it all anyway. We reward people who help us and he got his reward. His worries are over.’
    ‘Where’s Bobby?’
    ‘All in good time.’
    ‘What have you done to Bobby?’ he ignored me. It seemed he was keen to let me know how clever he’d been.
    ‘What do you think of my boys eh?’ he asked me, ‘heavy duty aren’t they? Took out your doormen in double-quick time. I met them in Amsterdam running guns, dope and women. We took a little of all three,’ so Gladwell had no scruples about whether the women in his knocking shops were volunteers or not. Some poor, young lass leaves her village in the Ukraine looking for a better life in the west and instead ends up being raped by a dozen strangers a day with none of the money going back to her. ‘And we stayed in touch,’ he made them sound like old pals from Uni.
    ‘Vitaly here was a captain in the Russian army. Do you know what the Spetsnaz is?’ I nodded weakly but he told me anyway, ‘Russian special forces. They are just as hard as our boys, but prepared to go that little bit further, if you know what I mean. I put that down to Chechnya. Your average Russian soldier didn’t want to get