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Overture
Chapter 5
Repercussion
The lamplight glinted through the glass of malt whisky as Tricia held it up, saluting Gordon across the coffee table. She eyed him carefully, then withdrew the glass and took a small sip, wincing ever so slightly as she did so.
“So,” she said, grinning hugely. “Here’s to the new star of primetime. How did it go last night?” Gordon lifted his own glass, which contained nothing more seditious than sparkling mineral water, and reflected for a moment upon the amount of inner strength that it had taken him to refrain from indulging in alcohol. This then passed, and he smiled.
“A lot better than I thought it would,” he told her, “especially considering we had to improvise things with Heath. He seemed all right with it, though. Not a bad chap, if you ask me.” Tricia just about choked on her drink at this point.
“Not bad?” she echoed, incredulous. “You lucky sod. What wouldn’t I have given to talk to Heath Ledger? He’s delicious.”
Tricia clasped her drink in front of her, wrapping long fingers around the glass; Gordon idly noted that every single one of her nails was painted in a different colour of the rainbow. She seemed to be on the point of changing tack, and was gazing vaguely into the whisky while she composed her thoughts. At length, she raised her head and fixed Gordon with a beady eye.
“On a not very related note,” she said, slowly, “you did mention that there was something you wanted to ask me. Not that I’m averse to your company,” she added, lifting one corner of her mouth in a gentle smirk, “but I’ve had a rough day, and right now I’d like nothing better than to see the soft side of my pillow. So...why am I here?”
Gordon had been devoting considerable thought as to how to broach this subject, and had still not reached a comfortable conclusion. However, deciding that there were far worse character traits than blunt honesty, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the velvet sack. Pulling at the bow, he opened the bag and tipped the diamonds out onto the glass-topped table, where they shimmered and coruscated in the soft light. Tricia’s jaw fell; though he’d heard the cliché, Gordon never thought he’d see it in action.
“Fuck me,” she whispered, her eyes fixed to the gems as if they were on strings. “What the hell are you doing with that lot?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” said Gordon, after a short pause for consideration. At this, Tricia finally ripped her gaze up and aimed it in his direction. Her eyes narrowed considerably.
“I think you just did, matey,” she said, and then looked back down again, her expression glowing with equal amounts of avarice and incredulity. “I just want to know when you turned into Arsčne Lupin, that’s all.”
“Tricia, I didn’t steal them.” Gordon caught his breath just then, aware that with the slightest stress on the ‘I’, he’d given everything away. But what the hell, he thought, you were probably going to do that anyway. Tricia, to give her credit, didn’t miss it either.
“So who did?” she asked, “and, while I think of it, what’s all this got to do with that mask you asked me to fix up? If you say ‘nothing’, I’ll smack you,” she finished.
Reminding himself of the blunt honesty tactic, Gordon sighed, drew his hands down his face and said, “All right. I’ve become involved with a mysterious masked man with a talent for thievery, all thanks to my father, who rescued him from a burning detention centre, patched him up and sent him my way. Is that any better?”
In the brief silence that followed this statement, Gordon heard a police siren shriek past a few streets away. It wasn’t until this background detail had died away that Tricia began to laugh.
“You’re good,” she cackled, casting him a sidelong look, “you really are.” When her laughter had subsided, she continued. “Never mind, though. If you don’t want to tell me, fair enough, but I still want to know what this has to do with me.”
Gordon leaned over the table, scooping the diamonds back into the bag and tweaking the drawstring tight once more. He didn’t respond until they were safely stowed away.
“I’d like to find a buyer for these,” he said, eventually. “I’d go down to
“No kidding,” Tricia replied, although there was a faintly glazed, distant cast to her eyes as she said this. Gordon sat back, perturbed, but she seemed to recover after a second or two. “All right,” she went on, “but what makes you think I know any fences?”
“Sixth sense,” Gordon shot back, smiling somewhat bitterly. When she pierced him with another kilowatt stare, he conceded and said, “Sorry, it was just a long shot, really. Do you know any?”
“As it happens, I do,” Tricia said, “but in future, don’t assume, all right? You great pillock.” This last shot was fired with enough good humour to convince Gordon that her feelings weren’t mortally injured, and he exhaled.
“So, can you set something up for me?” He watched her hesitate, and added, “I’ll give you five per cent for your trouble.”
That appeared to settle matters. Tricia smiled, and extracted her mobile phone. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll just go and make a quick call, all right?” Without waiting for a response, she bounced up from the armchair and slipped out into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her.
When she’d gone, Gordon sagged, sliding back into the sofa cushions, feeling the incriminating weight of the jewels in his pocket. For what must be the hundredth time in the last week, he wondered what on earth he was getting himself mired in. It was, of course, true that after the first few minutes he’d spent with V, he was probably already in far too deep to extract himself.
This, though, was out of the realms of the peculiar and into the deep waters of dangerous. The only reason that he’d even countenanced this move was that holding onto the diamonds in the long term was the one option that he felt he didn’t really have; his only two choices were to give them back to V or sell them and, if he were perfectly honest with himself, the former decision would have been a very traumatic one.
Gordon poured himself another glass of water and then, his hand acting on autopilot, reached for the whisky bottle and added a dash of that to his glass as well. The resultant cocktail was faintly nauseating but he drained it anyway, gagging once, feeling that this was scarcely the time to go completely teetotal.
Tricia returned, stowing her phone away as she did so. Gordon looked up into her face and, as he did so, halted dead in the middle of framing an innocent inquiry. Her expression was a bizarre confusion of several smaller components; so much so that he found it impossible to distinguish any one element. In any case, this eerie physiognomic study was replaced soon enough by a bright smile, and Tricia grabbed her coat from the back of the chair.
“Ready?” she said. Gordon stared, still tasting the whisky and water bubbling gently at the back of his throat.
“Now?” he asked, disbelieving. Tricia nodded shortly. “Now,” she confirmed. “No time like the present, is there?”
She led the way out of the door without another word, although it was impossible not to see that even as she turned, that curiously skewed expression had returned to her face and, this time, remained there. Gordon felt a tiny twitch of unease pick at his stomach, but shoved it down firmly.
At Tricia’s insistence, they walked to their rendezvous; it wasn’t far away, she told him. Gordon kept his head down as they moved through the dozing streets, although it seemed to him that even as much as they passed very few people along the way, the city itself was watching them through one slanted green eye, like a cat feigning sleep.
They came, at length, to
The moon, though it was sailing high somewhere over their heads, was sequestered behind a modest veil of cloud at that moment, and the alley deepened and closed in, almost to the point of claustrophobia, as they left the streetlights behind them. Tricia indicated a steel door in the wall of the warehouse with a curt tilt of her head, and then turned the handle, leading the way inside.
Gordon twitched violently as the door banged shut behind him; the sound had a hint of grim finality about it. Once more, he lingered on the promontory of retreat, but once more he stamped down hard upon that hesitancy, swallowed his unease and followed Tricia down the narrow passageway.
A second door opened out onto a small flight of stairs that led down into a windowless room, quite bare of furniture aside from one plain wooden table and two chairs set each side of it. The chair on the far side was occupied, although its resident was rising to greet them. He was a short but broad-shouldered Turk, shaven-headed to the point of gleaming, and regarding the world from beneath unruly black brows; his eyes themselves were set so deep that they were hard to see, let alone to scrutinise for subtext.
He wasn’t alone. Four other men stood some way behind him, any one of whom would have attracted much more than passing attention in an identity parade and any one of whom looked very much as if he would have the words ‘career criminal’ written right the way through him as if he were a stick of Brighton rock. One of them wore a gruesome pink scar from the corner of his mouth to the point of his cheekbone. It looked fairly fresh.
Tricia stepped forward, ostensibly the intermediary, and nodded carefully at the Turk before turning back to Gordon.
“This is Tazmir,” she said, by way of introduction, although Gordon couldn’t help but notice a thin, tainted edge to her voice as she spoke. Still, he extended a hand. Tazmir leaned across the table, shook it, and settled back down again, waving a hand at the vacant chair. Only when Gordon was comfortably seated did he speak up at last.
“Trish tells me you’ve got something you want to...offload,” he stated, his accent pure Stepney vintage. Gordon shifted in his chair, then pulled the diamonds out of his pocket and emptied them carefully onto the table. The gems slipped and scattered slightly, but otherwise formed a remarkably neat cone that the other man regarded with surprising equanimity. He extracted a jeweller’s loupe from his pocket, screwed it into his eye, then reached out and plucked one gem from amongst its fellows, scrutinising it minutely.
Gordon waited, floating in a sickly stew of impatience and nerves, as the other man muttered something unintelligible. Finally, he looked up, removing the loupe and setting it aside with painstaking care, dropping the diamond back onto the heap. His mouth formed a thin line.
“They’re marked,” he said, almost as if this would mean
something. Gordon knew that his face
must have registered his lack of understanding quite plainly, for the Turk went
on, slightly impatiently. “Little laser inscription
on the band,” he explained. “Looks like
a bog-standard
“How much can you give me for them?” Gordon asked, although he was sinking further and further into a pressing desire for escape with every passing second.
“Nothing,” Tazmir told him. Gordon’s stomach plunged, although not without backflipping artfully on its way down. He searched for an adequately polite response, reaching out meanwhile to gather the stones back up again. As he poured them back into their bag, however, Tazmir spoke up once more.
“I don’t think you caught my drift, mate,” he said, quite amicably. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take ‘em. I just said I wouldn’t give you anything for ‘em.”
Gordon tensed like a watch spring as full comprehension finally pounced upon him, although his muscles appeared to have betrayed him by seizing up and resolutely refusing to act. A tidal wave of sudden, gut-wrenching fear crashed over him, and he struggled with his recalcitrant tongue and vocal cords.
Before he could marshal these forces, however, he saw Tazmir jerk his head, signalling his companions. Two of them moved behind Gordon, and rough hands clamped down on his shoulders, pinning him into his seat. At this, he gasped, although it seemed that was the only sound he was capable of producing for the time being.
One of the men pulled a pair of cable ties out of a pocket, and fixed Gordon’s wrists to the arms of the chair with an ease that spoke volumes about long and detailed practice at such less than tender ministrations.
Why the hell aren’t you putting up a fight, he asked himself, distantly, and this seemed to strike a match in some small powder keg, albeit a little too late. He pulled at the restraints on his wrists, although he achieved nothing more than a biting pain that had him chewing the inside of his cheek to distract himself from it. He stared around him wildly, and then looked back at Tazmir with the greatest of difficulty.
“Look,” he said, slowly, his heart thumping so hard that he was sure it must he affecting his voice, “just take them. They’re stolen anyway. I won’t go to the police.” Tazmir smiled beatifically, reached into his pocket and produced a pearl-handled straight razor, flipping it open, holding the blade up so that it glinted fiercely and threw a beam of white light into Gordon’s eye for a moment.
“Oh, I know you won’t, mate,” he said, still running his eyes along the razor’s very edge. “In fact, I’m positive you won’t.”
Just then, Tricia spoke up, stepping between the two and laying her palms on the table, turning to Tazmir, her brows knotted.
“Taz, this wasn’t the deal!” she said, her voice speckled with agitation. “I told you I’d get them, and I did. You don’t have to...”
“Shut up,” he responded, quite casually, finally lowering the razor a little, the better to return her stare. “You did a good job, babe, but why not leave the rest to the blokes?” Incredibly, he winked at her. She failed to respond in kind, but threw Gordon a fretful glance before turning back to the Turk.
“Taz, please. Listen. You don’t want to do this,” she yelped, her voice cracking through any attempt at sensibility like water breaching a failing dam. Tazmir frowned brutally, reached up and wrapped one hand around the back of her neck, dragging her head down until their eyes were inches apart. She struggled fitfully for a second, but ceased all fight as his fingers tightened.
“No. You listen,” he growled into her face. “You got three choices. Stay here and keep quiet, go outside and keep quiet, or join your friend. You’ll get your cut...” he went on, releasing his grip, allowing Tricia to stagger back, rubbing at the red blotches on her neck, “...one way or another.” He flourished the razor once more to illustrate his meaning. Tricia, seeming hypnotised by the shining blade, backed away uncertainly.
“Tricia...” Gordon said, faintly, desperately, as she retreated. She cast him a wide-eyed look that tried to convey absolute apology, but was too well-steeped in guilt and terror, and then turned about and fled the scene as if Cerberus were snapping at her heels.
Once outside, Tricia slammed the outer door closed behind her and then leaned back against it, her heartbeat and breathing racing against one another like startled colts. She shook her head once, blindly, and felt her body unclench somewhat.
The moon swung behind a bank of thin cloud at that point, its gleam not cut off but suddenly subdued, and the light in the alley flickered and died to a ghostly glow that illuminated nothing but itself. Tricia’s head jerked up, her eyes scuttling from side to side in the newfound gloom as if she had only just realised where she was. Thinking rapidly and only half-clearly, she pushed herself away from the door.
She turned to meet nothing but blackness. Her feet moved of their own accord, taking her back one step; her gaze, however, was already turning up, with the inevitability of impending doom, to meet the face of the figure that barred her way.
Tricia loosed a shriek. This was what her mind had framed, at least, but what emerged from her lips was a soft, pitiful squeal. That black-clad angel still smiled gently down upon her, but now she submerged herself in blind instinct and swung around, meaning to run, even into the blind end of the alley, anywhere, as long as it was away from this dreadful apparition.
This opportunity never came. She had barely moved an inch when an iron grip landed upon her shoulder, pulling her back into the figure’s embrace, and then she was closed up against a cool, firm and implacable body, struggling weakly. She gasped for air again, this time meaning to scream her lungs out, this time intending to appeal for either help or mercy but, before she could even draw sufficient breath, a gloved hand slipped itself over her mouth and cut off all further pleading.
The figure’s cloak fell around her shoulders now, enveloping them both. Tricia hardly registered this; her senses were already fogged over with panic and she had frozen like a mouse in the coils of a python, her stillness born of the same despairing instinct for self-preservation. The shadow, however, was leaning down, exhaling into her ear, its breath a lover’s caress.
This soft susurrus was the last thing Tricia ever heard. The hand was removed from her mouth, cupped around her chin and pulled viciously to one side, breaking her neck with a brief but sickening crack of vertebrae.
V wrapped one arm around the girl as she convulsed, pinning her against his chest. When that reflexive shudder died away, he loosed his grip slightly, and her head lolled back against his shoulder, her eyes already glazing over, filled with nothing but moonlight. Only now did he release her, watching her limp corpse slide into a shallow puddle.
Then, without a backward glance or any further ado, he turned to the door and pulled it open.
In the uncompromising light of the warehouse, Tazmir grinned broadly at Gordon, and heaved himself out of his chair, moving around the table. He laid the razor on the table-top, mere inches from Gordon’s firmly bound right hand, deliberately taunting, and stepped back to study his prey for a moment.
Gordon dropped his chin and closed his eyes. He had had no idea, before now, of the power of pure and unadulterated terror; had not one clue as to how crippling it could be. It filled his head from side to side and from point to point with turbulent black storm clouds and thwarted his every faint attempt at thought, movement or speech. All he now seemed to be capable of was a febrile quivering that insinuated itself down his spine to every extremity and, at last, even took over his ears. He scarcely heard Tazmir retrieve the razor from the table and open it to its fullest extent.
At that moment, the door at the top of the stairs swung back with a curiously intimate creak. Tazmir glanced up, his mouth already framing the beginnings of some irate query. Gordon watched the man’s face sag in incomprehension, and twisted his head around to see who or what had interrupted these grim proceedings.
V, framed in the doorway, dipped his head in a slow and decorous bow before moving delicately down the few steps and pushing his cloak back over his shoulders. Gordon’s eye lit at once upon V’s belt, and the six exquisite silver-handled knives now sheathed in it. With a terror-sharpened eye for detail, Gordon noticed how the pommels glinted, star-like, beneath the light of the neon tubes.
Tazmir’s mouth, which was still hanging open, snapped shut once more. He took two steps back. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.
“Cry ‘havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war,” said V, “that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.”
The Turk had apparently heard enough. He nodded sharply at his companions, two of whom circled around and approached V from both sides, although with care, their eyes fixed to his hands. V remained, it appeared, blithely unconcerned by this. Gordon, trying to breathe through a throat that seemed to be coated with gypsum, could discern no hint of expression at all; the mask was, for once, rendered silent. Nevertheless, some hitherto unheard sense made him brace himself.
There was scarcely time. As one of the men reached out, V dropped his hands to his belt, withdrawing two knives with a discordant, jarring slide and ring that sent an echo around the warehouse. Before this had died away he dropped to one knee, arms flung out, striking up and out to either side, and was rising once more from this crouch even as the blades struck home.
Razor-sharp
V, sheathing the knives once more, sidestepped adroitly and grasped a collar in each hand before his victims could collapse. He dropped his head, studying them coldly for a moment, the mask turning from side to side with vague contempt, and then released his hold. The two landed in the glutinous, steaming piles of their own viscera, twitching like landed fish.
This whole dance, from greeting to gutting, had taken just a pocketful of seconds; time enough, though, for Tazmir to back away, almost tripping over his own feet in the process. Part of his mind – the part that had kept him alive and reasonably healthy for the past twenty years – considered fleeing, but sheer, blood-thumping outrage was holding his common sense hostage and, besides, V stood between him and the only unlocked door.
“What are you hanging about for?” he barked at his two remaining associates. They glanced at one another, and then one drew a pistol from inside his coat and raised it, hand shaking almost imperceptibly. Too slowly, however. V reached out, quite without looking, and turned off the lights.
Gordon whimpered as the room was plunged into near-absolute darkness, although he heard Tazmir yelp at one and the same time. There was a tiny, breathless pause before V’s voice cut through the shadows, his every syllable hinting at vengeful pleasure.
“I can see in the dark,” he purred, “and you’re afraid of it.” With that, there were several light footsteps, a whisper and flap of cloth and the scrape of steel, and then hell’s finest fury erupted in the gloom.
The gun went off, just once, and in that momentary, blinding muzzle flash Gordon saw V’s blade sweep out a shining geometric arc with annihilation at the end of it. This ended in a wet, bubbling scream and a sharp clatter as the gun was sent spinning away into a corner, and then Gordon jerked back in mindless horror as something warm and sticky splashed across his face in the dark. Though he was scarcely aware of it, he was shedding free and unfettered tears now, his breath laboured, his mind overloaded with fright and incomprehension.
Something hit the wall, heavily. Someone shouted, their voice rough and guttural, and then there was a strident bang which spawned an ear-splitting screech of agony. There came a grinding, snapping sound from the far corner; a gristly sound, a sound with a rusty saw-toothed edge to it. Only then did the darkness reclaim its peace, and nothing further split the shadows but a hoarse, desperate and, somehow, not quite human panting.
The lights flickered back on now, and V paced back to the centre of the room, hands clasped in front of him, contemplative in a cocoon of complete silence that he wore just as comfortably as his cloak. Gordon blinked back the clouds that were threatening to overwhelm his vision, and spat at the taste of hot, tangy blood on his lips.
The warehouse resembled an abattoir. Gordon hung his head, weeping quietly and steadily now, but not before several monstrous images had cauterised his brain. The blood painted across the floor and sprayed in copious gouts across the wall. The sprawling corpses, one of which now had his head twisted around through one hundred and eighty degrees. Lastly, the sight of Tazmir, a long, gleaming knife punched with murderous force through the back of his hand, pinning him to the table. He had wrapped his other hand around the grip and was trying to draw it out, to free himself, but with no success. Pain had rendered him disoriented and weak and, in any case, the point of the blade was sunk a full inch deep in the wood beneath his palm.
At that point, the near silence of the room was flavoured with a distant, muted sound; one that, if it hadn’t been for the stillness, would have passed unheeded...some way away, Big Ben was marking out the midnight hour. V moved up behind Tazmir, his every movement languid and fluid.
“I go, and it is done; the bell invites me,” he said, simply, before stepping back and drawing another knife from his belt. With that signature economy of movement, he slipped this around Tazmir’s throat and drew it across; his touch was so efficient, and the blade so sharp, that for a split second it wasn’t certain that any contact had even been made. Tazmir coughed once. He coughed again, this time exhaling a stream of scarlet bubbles that ran down his chin. Then a startling waterfall of fresh blood poured from his throat and surged down his chest, and he went down like a falling domino, his head smacking into the table and his severed arteries continuing to pump their load onto the bare wood.
Moments ticked past, almost audibly. Gordon, his eyes still misted with tears, fixed his gaze on the spreading pool of blood on the table, watching it with that tranquillity which marked the quiet, leafy suburbs of insanity. One stray rivulet flowed gently over the surface, coming ever closer, and finally poured over the edge in a glutinous but steady trickle.
“Gordon,” said V, from several thousand miles’ distance. “Are you hurt?”
Gordon said nothing, although he raised his head a fraction and saw the knife in V’s hand, studied the blood there too, and watched the single fat, glossy droplet which was sliding down the angled blade, preparing to fall. He thought, quite dreamily, that he would be perfectly content just to watch it for a while.
“Gordon?” V repeated, a shade more insistently. He followed the line of those wide, vacant eyes, sighed infinitesimally, shook the knife to remove the excess blood from it, and slipped it back into its sheath with a neat and decisive click. This done, he stepped closer and reached out. He lifted Gordon’s chin gently but firmly and, seeing no gash or wound in his throat, released his hold.
This brief touch shook Gordon slightly; enough, at least, to rouse him halfway out of incipient catatonia. He screwed his eyes up to ease the burning in them, and opened them once more to see V circling the table like a buzzard, apparently locked in patient cogitation.
He paused in this circuit and cast a short but highly appraising glance over at the far side of the warehouse and at one of the dead men then, with only mild transition, at the diamonds on the table. Finally, he swung his eyes over to Gordon who, for his part, found that he was in no position to return that incisive, calculating stare.
At last, V circled back around the table and moved alongside Gordon’s chair. He cut the plastic strips on his wrists and then laid a hand on Gordon’s arm as he stood, wobbling on his feet but managing to retain his balance after a momentary struggle.
“Gordon,” V said, his voice pitched low and subtle, his tone that which a doctor might use to talk a man down from a window ledge, “I must know if you touched anything in here.”
“No,” was Gordon’s eventual answer, after which he shook his head vaguely. “I...at least, I don’t remember doing so.” He raised a hand and wiped furiously at his cheek, pulling his hand back and observing the slick bloodstains on his fingers; not with his former frozen detachment, but with some new, lower mental plateau of manageable horror and nausea. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, but V took his wrist in a gentle grip.
“Go home,” he said. “Touch nothing until you are there. Use the handkerchief. Do you understand?” he added, as Gordon’s brow wrinkled briefly.
“Yes. Yes,” he said, with emphasis. At long last, V released his grasp upon Gordon’s wrist, and turned away.
It wasn’t until he heard the door click shut behind him that V reached out and plucked the diamonds from the table, dangling the bag between finger and thumb for a moment. Drawing it open, he reached in and extracted several of the stones with the utmost delicacy, his gaze passing over their facets and over their rainbows. Then, he closed his fist upon the gems, shielding their allure.
There was a lot to be done before sunrise.
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