Chapter Twenty-Eight

Convince It To Walk Afterwards 

Liz pretended to laugh. Stephen didn’t. Liz’s laugh faded, slowly, and then stopped.

“Hang on, wait. Stephen. We don’t know what it is that you want.”

He never took his eyes off Liz like a fox eyeing its prey.

“I’m giving you five minutes to go and get it Sandra. Five minutes. Have you got a watch?”

“No”, she said, and fished into her pocket. “I’ve got a phone though.”

He turned his head to her.

“What? What’s that?”

“It’s Richard’s phone. Sebastian gave it to me. I called you on it, remember? The only name in it was Daniel Cameron.”

He kept half an eye on Liz as he held his hand out to Sandra.

“Give me the phone Sandra. Give it to me and you two can walk away from all of this.”

She held it out to him, but just out of his reach.

“Why? Can you guarantee our lives? How can you prove it to us? You let her go, and I’ll give you the phone.”

“I told you I’d kill her if you didn’t give me what I wanted. Give it to me.”

“You’re full of shit Stephen. What are you going to kill her with?”

“I’ll find something now give me the fucking phone.”

“What’s on the phone Stephen? What is it?”

“You weren’t supposed to be involved in this, none of you were, it was between me and my brother.”

“Well we did. All you’ve got to do is pass Liz the key, I’ll pass you the phone, everyone gets what they want.”

Hands shaking he reached into his pocket for the key. He pulled out a handful of keys, and threw them at Liz. She caught them in surprise, and looked at them. They weren’t the keys they’d seen him with. They were, in fact –

“Those are my keys”, Sandra said. Stephen started laughing, and leaning forward whist she was distracted snatched the phone from her. She knew immediately she couldn’t get it back off him, and looked to Liz who threw her keys to her. “You bastard how did you get my keys?”

Stephen reached under the desk and pulled out her handbag, white with long handles, and casually placed in on the desk as he looked at the phone.

“The problem with bastards Sandra is that you can’t trust them”, and he unlocked the phone. He looked at it, did nothing, then looked back at Sandra.

“Oooh”, she said, “the problem with bastards Stephen is that you just can’t trust them.”

“What’s the pin?”

“And we’re back on my side of the table”, she said.

“What’s the damn pin?”

“Key to the door. And my handbag please. I was quite fond of that bag.”

He put the key in the bag and threw it at her. She slung the bag over her shoulder, ever so casually, then reached in and threw the key to Liz. She unlocked the door, but Sandra didn’t move.

“I’ve got a question for you first.”

“What?” Liz exploded. “Sandra, what the fuck? Let’s just get out of here.”

“Listen to your friend, I gave you the key. Now you can leave.”

“Yeah I don’t think it’ll be quite that easy”, Sandra said. “Where’s your thugs? They’ll be around here somewhere. They won’t let us go without your say so.”

Stephen laughed.

“My thugs? Thugs? I don’t have any ‘thugs’. I know what you’re thinking of, but they didn’t belong to me.”

“Who did they belong to? Bonnet guy?”

“Bonnet guy?”

“You’re friend in the suit”, Liz shot back. “He’s dead you know. Sandra threw him off a balcony. Died on Richard’s bonnet.”

Stephen looked at Sandra in shock. Then at Liz. Then back to Sandra. Then he laughed.

“You killed Clark? You? Killed Clark? Jesus Christ, there’s a lot of people out there who’d like to shake your hand. He was a nasty piece of work. You killed him? How does that feel, Sandra? It’s a bit of a shock at first, isn’t it? But then, you start to think, it wasn’t so hard. Tell you what – it gets easier. It really does.”

Sandra was grinding her teeth. If she’d had a large plank of wood right now…

“Is that why you killed Sebastian? To see if you could do it again?” she asked.

“Again? No, that man on the floor there is only the second person I’ve killed. And I never meant to kill Sebastian. That was an accident.”

“You beat him to death.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t meant to be to death. He had this phone, this phone that was meant for me. I needed it, he wouldn’t hand it over, so I threatened him. I had no idea how easy it was to inflict that much injury upon a man.”

Sandra understood, in a way.

“Neither did I”, she said. He looked at her.

“Clark killed Richard, not I. And I’d asked him not to. He was never meant to die. He wasn’t even a Pohler for Christ’s sake, his namesake is not even his father.”

“Who is then?”

“I don’t know. His mother confided in me when she found she was pregnant with him. She never told my brother, he never knew. Nobody knew until I told Sebastian. He did a little research into his mother’s past, I think he had a suspicion. I don’t know if he told his brother. It’s irrelevant now, since they’re both dead.”

“Why did he kill Richard?”

He sat back, placed the phone on his desk, and crossed his arms. He looked at Sandra, relishing the moment.

“I don’t have a lot of time you know”, he said.

“Yet here we are. And you’re obviously relishing this. Fill in the gaps for me.”

He leant forward.

“It was because of you Sandra.”

“Bullshit.”

“Believe it. You got in the way. Clark had something for me, but I got delayed. He was followed by Sebastian who knew what he was up to, my fault probably, so he starts chatting up some nice girls – you two. But Sebastian turns up anyway, and starts talking his way into the conversation.”

Liz blinked, a little confused. But Sandra understood.

“Daniel Cameron. He introduced himself as Daniel Cameron. Motherfucker.”

“I don’t get it”, Liz said.

“She does”, Stephen said. “They chat, but Clark is wily, he drops it into your bag before Sebastian even gets there, so when Sebastian follows him and confronts him down a side street, he’s clean. Nothing.”

“So he broke into the apartment looking for my bag.”

“He was watching you for a long time you know. It was supposed to be simple – drug you both, wait till you fall asleep, take the bag. But you go and bloody drink half of Richard’s drink as well. You conk, he doesn’t conk properly, so when Clark breaks in to get the stuff from your bag not only is the bag gone but Richard’s in the bloody shower. Clark figures out he knows, he’s onto him. Confronts him, doesn’t go well. Richard tells him he’s copied the data and emailed it to his brother. Clark kills him for it. Against his better judgement he leaves you alive, given that you saw nothing. If he was lucky, you’d get done for it.”

“So… if I’d..”

“If you’d not drunk his bloody drink, if you’d not gone home with them, if you’d just not fucking been there, my nephew would still be alive.”

“He’s not your nephew”, Sandra said.

“He fucking was as far as any of us were concerned”, Stephen snapped back. “And you’re the reason he’s dead.”

“Bullshit. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter – if I’d not gone home with them then he’d have broken into my house and killed me instead. How is that better?”

Stephen stood up, and this time instead of the phone he had a large kitchen knife in his hand.

“Because then there’d be less dead people. There’d just be you.”

He moved towards Liz, who was stunned motionless long enough for him to charge. She leapt out of the way and he fell into the door, slamming it shut again. Liz and Sandra stepped backwards over the dead body, and found themselves in a corner. Stephen stayed in front of the door.

“I told you I don’t have much time, and that wasn’t bullshit. Give me the pin to Richard’s phone, and I leave. I won’t hurt you. But I’m counting to five. One.”

“What is it?”

“Two.”

“What’s the information?”

“Three.”

“I have to know.”

“Four.”

“Why have all these people died?”

“Five.”

He moved towards them, knife raised and hatred in his eyes. He moved fast for an older man as well, but to beat a man like Sebastian to death he would have to.

“113” Sandra shouted, and the knife stopped just in her face.

“What?”

“It’s 113.”

“It’s four digits.”

“I’ll tell you the fourth digit if you step aside.”

He looked at her, and smiled that bastard Pohler smile.

“How many goes do I get before it freezes me out?” he asked. “Three? Three guess it is. Then I’ve got – oh, maybe two minutes before I get three guesses again. How’s your maths, ladies? That’s two, four, six, plus a minute of trying – seven minutes to live. What are you going to do with your seven minutes?”

Sandra went to move.

“It was a rhetorical question. Don’t move.”

He held the knife aloft, and with the other hand tried the pin a couple of times. Sandra watched, praying he went numerically. 1131. Wrong. 1132. Wrong. 1133. Frozen.

“Dammit.”

“So who is this Clark?” she asked.

“Clark worked for Richard back in the day. I bought him to get the data I wanted. Unfortunately, after his son was killed, Richard bought him back. Anybody can be bought ladies. Anybody. You can’t trust anyone.”

“Is that what happened at the restaurant?”

“Those bastards. I knew them. I knew all of them. And they were prepared to kill me, and my family. All because someone paid them the most. Who does that? No loyalty. Oh, time up.”

He tried the phone again. 1134. Wrong. 1135. Wrong. 1136. Wrong. Frozen.

“Right. So those bastards kill for money. What do you kill for, Stephen?” Sandra pushed. And she could see that she’d pushed him far enough. There was blood in Stephen’s gaze, a hatred that she’d never seen before, not even in the eyes of people trying to kill her. This was a deep, personal, corrupted hatred. Something that had spent so long it had taken over, like an argument in your head that escalates without the other person even knowing it happened.

“That cunt took my life from me”, he snarled. “He took everything I built. Everything I made. My. Fucking. Life. And all because I kept his wife’s secret. I kept Andrea’s secret. And for what? For fucking what?”

Sandra said nothing. She knew she was in a dangerous place right now, she’d pushed him to the point of quite literally exploding. At least it seemed he would. But he continued.

“This phone, this data, has everything on it. Everything that he did, all the transactions, the movement of money from one company to another, all of the evidence needed to show that mother fucker to be the corrupt prick that he is. This is all of his crimes, all of his bribes, all the money moving around, it’s all in here. I’m going to destroy him like he destroyed me. Only this time he has much farther to fall.”

He drifted off for a second, then looked at the phone.

“Last try”, he said. 1137. Wrong.

“Wait –“ Sandra said.

1138. Accepted. Sandra silently wished she’d gone for 1130. Damn the nerd inside of her.

Stephen saw the phone open up. He put flicked through it. He opened the email. He opened the messages. The phone was almost completely empty. He got flustered.

“There’s nothing there’, Sandra said.

He looked up at her.

“What?”

“There’s nothing on the phone. There’s nothing on either of the phones. Richard was bullshitting your friend, Stephen. He never saw the data. My bag never left his place, I left it here you idiot.”

“I searched your bag. There’s nothing in it. I searched your bag. I –“

He was momentarily distracted by the sound of running water.

“What the hell is that?”

He looked down and saw the water running at his feet. In surprise he turned around and looked at the water and sewage gushing underneath the office door. Then the smell came too, and it was bad. He recoiled from it and turned around back to Sandra and Liz, but didn’t see them. What he did see was the spine of a thick ledger that collided with his forehead. Sandra hurled it to the ground as Stephen also fell.

Liz turned to Sandra.

“I’ve never been so relieved to see shit flowing from underneath a door before. I could kiss that shit, I really could.”