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DRIVING ALONG THE NEAR deserted roads heading farther out into the countryside, Tufty Harbottle came to the conclusion that he was depressed. There was no other word for it. Depressed, plain and simple.
He looked into the rear-view mirror at the three girls lying doped up and barely conscious on his back seat and shuddered. This wasn’t what he’d signed up for. Somewhere behind him that sneaky little scrote, Sanay Costa, was tailing him, otherwise Tufty would have been tempted to pull over somewhere and just let the girls out. But with Sanay only a minute or so away, he knew it would take him too long to even get them out of the cab of the Hilux, much less off into a field somewhere out of sight of the road. And Sanay would tell Vijay, there was no doubting that. In fact Tufty had a nasty suspicion that Vijay had stopped trusting him at all, and that was why Sanay had been sent with him again.
He heaved a miserable sigh. He was a fighter, not a killer. And especially not a killer of girls like these, who couldn’t raise a finger to fight back. That poor Nigerian cow in the middle seat, for instance. Where had she come from? She wasn’t one of Vijay’s girls. This was doing the dirty work for that bloody uncle of Vijay and Sanay’s, the Estonian one. Vijay wanted to move up in the dark world of the gangs, and this was his test, of that Tufty was almost certain. And if it all went wrong, and he got caught, well the big men were safely distanced from it all.
Disgust at them and himself filled Tufty until he could barely focus enough to keep driving. But what chance had he ever had? That stupid bitch of a mother of his, it was all her fault. Who gave a kid living on the worst council estate in the Walsall area a name like Gaylord, for fuck’s sake? And with him being ginger-haired and freckled too, it was as though he’d had a bloody great target painted on him from day one.
Kids in the scabby primary school might have struggled to print their own names, even by the time they left for secondary school, but they knew what ‘gay’ meant. Or rather, they might not have known the details at five or six years old, but they’d been told by older brothers or sisters, or even parents, that it was someone who did ‘dirty things’ with other men, and that they were perverts. And with kids’ logic, they’d assumed that if Tufty was called Gay, then he must be gay. Political correctness didn’t exist on his home estate.
That had put Tufty in more fights than he could recall even in the first couple of years at school, and there was a certain viewpoint that said that since he was a common factor in all of them, then he must have been part of the cause. The fact that he had been a victim back in those days had gained him little sympathy or help. So it was no wonder that he’d grown up to be a fighter. He wouldn’t have grown up at all if he hadn’t, because sooner or later he’d have ended up down on the ground getting a good kicking, and probably several.
He sighed again, thinking back to his teenage years. The only way to stay even halfway safe had been to join a gang. By that time a whole succession of men had made their way through his mother’s scruffy two-bedroom flat, and she now spent her time shooting up, too busy getting numbed to her own miseries to be bothered about his. Yet his role in that gang and the ones which had followed it had always been to be the muscle. The one who could put down anyone who threatened the leaders; the one who could be sent to give a beating to anyone who stepped out of line. Only a beating, mind. Tufty was good at making it painful without crossing the line into permanent harm, because what the gangs wanted was someone who’d carry on paying, not a corpse, nor a cripple sent into some nursing home.
And that was what he thought he’d signed up for with Vijay. He’d been quite proud to discover that this up-and-coming gang leader had approached his old crew, and had told them that Tufty would be working for him from now on. In his mind, that was like what happened with people in top jobs – they got poached by others who wanted their skill – and so for the first year or so he’d done his job with pride.
But then something had changed with Vijay. Maybe it was Sanay coming to join them, bringing with him the link to the Estonian trafficker, but around that time, things had suddenly started to get much darker. Up until then, Vijay had taken on only local girls. Most of them were the kind of slags who’d been lifting their skirts for boys long before they’d left school, so there wasn’t much of a change in moving them over into full prostitution when at least they got paid for their efforts. Indeed to Tufty’s way of thinking, they were better off with him around. No customer got physical with them when he was on duty, and if he asked for a little sweetener on the side, well he’d always liked his sex straightforward, nothing kinky. And a couple of the working girls in Vijay’s stable had actually been fond of him because he was never rough with them.
Yet within six months, most of the girls he’d known and liked had left, mostly thrown out by Vijay as past their best, or in the case of two of them, making a run for it after one horrendous night of ‘entertaining’ four of the Estonian’s so-called friends. As he drove on into the night now, Tufty wondered whether Vijay had somehow found out that he’d been behind helping Maria and Aoife get away and onto the ferry back over to Ireland, where their parents had come from and where they still had family to go to? If so, he’d taken his time over challenging him about it, which made Tufty think that maybe that secret was still safe.
The new girls, though, worried him considerably. Some of them seemed ridiculously young even by the loose moral standards of their trade. And now most of them barely spoke any English at all.
Vijay’s explanation of, “Safer for us, innit? They don’t speak no English, they can’t tell the filth on us, can they?” had never sat well with Tufty.
Why would they need to go to the coppers if they’d chosen to work the streets? There was always movement in that community, with some women finding their way out of the trade – either by rehabilitation for the drugs they had to sell themselves to pay for, or by managing to get a proper job, though those were rarer – but unless someone was brutal with them, very few of the girls ever grassed on their pimps. So Vijay’s excuse had seemed weak to Tufty. Instead he feared that Vijay was starting to take on the girls the Estonian was smuggling in, with Vijay giving him a kick-back from what they earned.
Quite why Vijay would want to split his profits with that one was beyond Tufty. Surely it was better to have your own dozen girls and keep everything except what you gave them, rather than share it with someone who’d then got a hold over you? But clearly Vijay didn’t see it like that. He was ambitious. He wanted to be a big gangland name. And the only way that you got there was by working your way up through the bigger ‘organisations’.
Tufty sighed again. And that had been when he’d been told to find a disposal site. The first two girls he’d had to take out to the wilds and dump had died in one of the Estonian’s parties. That had been gruesome, because by the time he’d found somewhere, they’d been bloody ripe, and he’d had to have them bundled up in plastic sheets out in the open part of his truck. But at least they’d died by someone else’s hands.
A few months later, with those bodies still not having been found, Vijay had come to him with the first of those they’d actually killed out there.
“They’re trouble, bro’!” Vijay had said, Tufty noticing that his language had become even more gangsta of late. What was wrong with proper Black Country talk, eh? Why did Vijay feel he had to mimic some London Anglo-Asian crew, who in their turn were parroting what they’d picked up off American TV series and films?
“How am they trouble?” Tufty had demanded, deliberately broadening his Black Country dialect. “They’m just wenches. What can they do?”
Vijay had rolled his eyes, jiggling around like some rap singer from New York instead of a Walsall crook. “Tsk! You don’ get it, bro’. Ain’t for you to ask why. I say they go, they go, innit.”
“Boss, we can’t just go around dumping girls out in the wilds,” Tufty had begun protesting, but had been cut off by Vijay with,
“They in’t found them others, have they? So what you getting’ so jumpy for? An’ why do you care? They’s just trash. Trash what’s come to the end of its useful life. So we needs to dispose of it, innit? That’s what you do. You takes out the trash.”
And at that moment, all of Tufty’s pride in his job had slid away. Oh, he’d taken the two girls out to the quarry, but at that point he’d already realised that he had very little choice. He himself had always carried a knife, but he’d been appalled to discover that Vijay had a gun, and a semi-automatic one at that. One burst from that thing, and he could be practically cut in two by the bullets, because from his time on the Territorial Army ranges, Tufty knew just what that gun could do – which was probably more than Vijay did. And he remembered what the army instructors had said, as well, about whatever weapon you carry being able to be turned on you. In a one to one fight, Tufty was confident of coming out on top, but he was enough of a realist to know that if he was set upon by several blokes, then the chances were that one of them might get their hands on his weapon. Well he’d probably survive a knifing, but a shooting was another matter, and so Tufty had always steered well clear of guns.
However, Vijay clearly thought it made him more macho, and Tufty had seen him putting the bloody thing into his car as they’d been getting ready to leave. What he’d also not been happy about was having Sanay sitting up front with him.
“He needs to know where to go if you in’t around, see?” Vijay had told him, and that had made Tufty start to think that it was time he got out of this game. Maybe it was time to think about going back-packing in Australia for a year, perhaps? Give it time for things here to calm down, then come back but to somewhere totally different. And no big cities where one gang might report down the grapevine that he’d been seen again.
That first time had been sickening for Tufty. Bloody Vijay wanted to try out the fucking gun!
“Bleedin’ ‘ell, boss!” Tufty had protested. “The quarry’s out o’ the way, but there’s still farms around there! Y’ can’t go around blastin’ away at stuff out here in the quiet without somebody hearin’!”
But it had been no good. After Tufty and Sanay had got the girls out of the Hilux, Vijay had started playing with them like a cat with mice. He told them to run, but they hardly understood a word, so he started shooting. At first it had been bursts at their feet, with Vijay and Sanay laughing hysterically as the bullets flung up sharp shards of stone, which cut the girls’ skin as they fled first one way and then another.
Tufty hadn’t found it funny, though. It had been all he could do not to let his tears flow, excusing the need to rub his eyes as the dust getting in them, and with it being dark, luckily neither Vijay nor Sanay could tell the difference. And for his part, he’d been beyond relieved that it was only the weekend after Bonfire Night, and so hopefully any locals would just think the distant bangs were idiot kids still letting off fireworks even this long after November the fifth.
Then Vijay had got bored, and with a callousness which shocked even Sanay, had sprayed the girls with bullets, before strolling back to his car. That was the first time Tufty ever saw Sanay looking deeply shocked and frightened. Vijay had crossed a line even with someone who licked arse as much as Sanay did. And though Vijay had told them to wait half an hour and then follow him, as soon as Vijay’s engine couldn’t be heard, Sanay had pleaded with him,
“Let’s get outta here! Please! I don’t wanna be here with ...with that!” and he’d pointed a shaky finger across to where the tattered corpses of the girls lay.
Tufty had been only too glad to leave too, but he’d had to stop twice in fairly quick succession for Sanay to be sick. After that, he’d turned off up a quiet road near to Knighton, and they’d shared the contents of his hip flask to calm both of their nerves while they waited for Vijay to get well ahead of them.
“I weren’t expectin’ that,” Sanay had confided to Tufty as they sat there. “You gotta believe me, man, I never thought he’d do that.” Then as the silence of the countryside settled around them, “Man it’s creepy out here. Why is it so quiet? Where is everyone?”
“It’s the countryside, you spanner!” Tufty had replied in disbelief. “There ain’t nobody out here. But that’s why you can hear stuff for miles. That’s why I wuz so worried somebody would hear bloody Vijay from miles away!”
Somehow they’d got away with that one. Nobody seemed to have reported hearing gunfire, and in the following weeks, again there were no reports of bodies having been found. For his part, Tufty only felt relief at not having been dragged further into the Estonian’s dark world, but he noticed that much of the bounce had gone out of Sanay. From then on, he wasn’t half so keen to be ingratiating himself into whatever Vijay was doing, and if Vijay misinterpreted it as Sanay showing him new respect, as befitted a rising star like himself, then neither Sanay nor Tufty was going to set him straight. But on several occasions, Tufty caught Sanay looking at him with an almost pleading look in his eyes that seemed to say, ‘For God’s sake don’t leave me alone with him’.
When the next three girls had been brought in to the gang’s ‘headquarters’ by two of the Estonian’s henchmen, Tufty had been the one who’d had to go out and throw up, already guessing what was going to happen. The difference this time was that Vijay wanted to try ‘somefin’ new’ that he’d seen on a porn film with the girls, and whatever it was, Tufty and Sanay had had to go and carry the two he’d chosen out of the room he’d used, the girls being catatonic in their distress. The other girl’s distress at seeing them, though, had made it a harrowing experience for Tufty, and the only blessing was that Vijay insisted the Tufty and Sanay be the ones to do the disposing.
“I’m not shootin’ or stabbin’ ‘em!” Tufty had stated categorically, as Sanay had finished helping him get the girls into the Hilux. “If they’ve got to go, then it’ll be with a drugs overdose. It’s not good any way you look at it, but at least they’ll go to sleep and never wake up. Not like those poor cows we took out there last time,” and Sanay had readily agreed, going and getting some smack and the needles to give it with.
That had been the previous time he’d been out here, but it had only been when he’d pulled up and seen how sheepish Sanay looked that made him look a bit harder.
“Fuck!” he’d gulped. “Where did those four come from?”
Four tattered bodies lay thrown in a heap over by one of the bigger boulders that had been left in the quarry.
“Vijay made me bring ‘em,” Sanay confessed. “It’s alright, Tufty, they was dead already.”
“Alright? Alright? You stupid fuck! It’s not alright. It’s not even close to alright! How many do you think we can dump here before somebody notices? I only found this place expecting to use it once. I’m bloody amazed that we’ve got away with it this far! It can’t keep happening, Sanay, it can’t!”
“And are you the one who’s gonna tell Vijay that?” Sanay had snapped defiantly.
“Yes, I am! But you need to, too! Jeez, Sanay! It don’t have to be me what gets caught for all of us to end up inside, y’know! You get caught with all these bodies, they’m going’ to send you down for ever and a day, too!”
Sanay had sniffed, trying to look hard and cool, but Tufty could see that he was ticking like a time bomb inside. Yet when the emotional outburst came, it was him Sanay threw accusations at, ending with, “An’ if you’m stupid enough to cross Vijay now, when him got so much power, you’m a fuckin’ fool!”
Tufty now shook his head at the memory. They’d given the girls the smack, and as soon as the needles had been drained, Sanay had driven off in his own car, leaving Tufty to make sure that the girls never woke up. Not that there was a damned thing that Tufty could have done for them, but for the first time he could remember, Tufty had got down on his knees in the dirt and tried to remember the Lord’s Prayer, which he’d last recited in the primary school. It was the only prayer he knew, and he was ashamed that it would have to do, but hopefully it was better than nothing. And that had been the time when he’d begun to have the nasty feeling that he was being watched.
But it had been after that that he’d also started seeing the warning signs with Vijay. The covert looks, the strange requests to go and fetch something while Vijay discussed something with whichever messenger it was that had come from the Estonian. All bits of nothing on their own, but all of which told Tufty that it was time to start watching his back. And now here he was on another one of these bloody errands to the quarry.
“Fuck’s sake, Sanay,” he muttered, as the headlights appeared behind him on a straight stretch. “Can’t you bugger off somewhere and just leave me to it?”
If he could just shake off his bloody watcher, he’d be gone, pointing the big car down toward South Wales and keeping going. Quite what he’d do with the girls was another matter. He’d probably have to drop them off at a homeless centre in somewhere like Cardiff or Swansea. But then he’d head off into the far west for a week or so, sell the Hilux, and then maybe ask to work his passage on one of the container ships heading out of Fishguard on the west coast of Wales. At least he’d bought the Hilux with money he’d honestly saved up, so he could sell it without any loans getting flagged up on it. Yes, that would get him away from here, and it wasn’t like he had much to regret leaving behind.
Yet when he pulled in at the quarry, to his horror, it wasn’t Sanay who got out of Sanay’s Toyota but Vijay.
“Weren’t expectin’ me, was yer, bruv,” Vijay said nastily, and God help him, he had that bloody gun with him again, and this time it was waving in Tufty’s direction. “Now get them bitches outta der car!”
I’m not getting out of here alive, Tufty thought. This is it, I’ve had it. I can’t outrun a bullet. My only chance is to try and catch him off balance.
He went to the rear door of the cab on the driver’s side, the one facing Vijay. He’d have to get this girl and the middle one out this way where Vijay could watch. But if he seemed to not be putting up a fight, then he might – just might – be able to take Vijay by surprise with the third one.
“Come on, bab’,” he said softly to the first girl, who was barely conscious enough to hear him, but he didn’t want to spook her. The poor cow was as good as dead already, and there was nothing he could do to save her, but that didn’t mean she had to go to her grave scared shitless by him. She almost fell into his arms, and he had to half carry her over to the boulder Vijay was gesturing him towards with the gun.
No sooner had he propped her against the rock and stepped away, than Vijay fired. God alone knew where he’d been to do it, but Vijay had had some practice with that thing, because this time it was a controlled short burst, and it was all on target. That really scared Tufty. He’d been hoping that Vijay’s aim was as haphazard and random as the last time, but this changed things. His only hope was to get in close, close enough to grab the bloody thing. But that chance wasn’t going to come with the next girl.
Instead, he struggled with getting her out of the middle seat, but used that to then seem to stumble with her, as though her visibly wobbly legs had somehow tripped him. It took him closer to Vijay. Close enough that by the light of the Toyota’s headlights, he could see Vijay more clearly. Yes! His eyes were glassy! That meant that he was drugged up. Maybe not a lot, given that he’d managed to drive down these twisting roads without wrapping the car around a tree, but enough for his reflexes to be slower.
Yet Tufty recovered his balance, got his arms under the girl’s, and asked calmly, “Where do you want this one?”
“Over there,” Vijay snapped, gesturing to the left of the first girl.
This time the burst was a bit more ragged, and Tufty wondered whether the smack, or whatever Vijay had taken, was wearing off just enough to make him a bit shaky by now.
He went around the back of the Hilux to get the third girl, then made much of struggling to get her out and stood up.
“What you playin’ at?” Vijay demanded irritably.
“I ain’t playin’ at anythin’,” Tufty protested. “She more off her head than the other two. I’m tryin’ to get her to where I can pick her up, but she keeps foldin’ up on me.”
“Oh fer fuck’s sake!” Vijay exploded, and Tufty heard the crunching of his footsteps on the rough surface as he moved to come around the back of the pickup.
Dropping the girl onto the ground, Tufty grasped the iron bar he always kept on the floor in the back of his cab. You never knew when you might need to have something to hand, and an old-fashioned tyre iron was not an obvious offensive weapon. It was now, though. Being much fitter than Vijay, when Tufty sprang at him it was with a speed Vijay wasn’t expecting, and the tyre iron smashed into his outstretched arm, sending the gun skittering away into the darkness.
With the fight now evened up, Tufty was in a stronger position, and he got in several hard punches before Vijay managed to get one on him back. The rough ground did neither of them any favours, though, and within seconds they were both down on the ground. Yet even here, Tufty’s extra weight was in his favour, and he ended up on top, jabbing two hard punches into Vijay’s face which left him lying still.
Rising panting to his feet, the first thing Tufty thought of was that bloody gun. He knew which way he’d thrown it, and grabbing the torch from his cab, it didn’t take him long to find it. Well that was one toy Vijay wasn’t going home with, and he ejected the magazine, hurling as far in one direction as he could, and then sending the empty gun far up and out into the bushes nearer the quarry entrance.
Yet Tufty wasn’t a killer, and that was his undoing. He’d just gone to pick the surviving girl up when he felt an excruciating pain lancing through his back. Vijay had had a knife! Why hadn’t he thought to search the evil little shit? Instead it was Vijay snarling into his ear,
“My turn, now!” and he laughed manically. “I’ve promised Sanay your precious truck, y’know. How you goin’ to feel, dyin’ an’ knowin’ your pride ‘n’ joy is bein’ driven by ma’ bitch now?”
As he staggered away from Vijay, feeling the knife’s blade still deep inside him, Tufty summoned one last act of defiance. He always pocketed his keys. It was automatic with him, and now his hand closed around them. With one last yell of pain and fury, Tufty drew back his arm and hurled the keys out into the darkness.
“Waaa?” shrieked Vijay. “What you done? You fuckin’ retard! You gone an’ spoiled it! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Pitching forwards to lie on the cold hard ground, all Tufty could do was watch as his life blood ran away. Watch as in his fury and spite, Vijay brutally dragged the remaining girl out to the others, and then strangled her with his bare hands. Tufty was just about conscious when Vijay got back into Sanay’s Toyota and drove away, and although he managed to feebly work his mobile phone out of his pocket, his fingers may have drifted over the emergency numbers, but there was no strength left in them to punch them in. And so although he weakly gasped, “Help me, please help me,” there was nobody to hear him.
Nobody that was, but the watchers. They had seen what had happened, they had seen him trying to fight back. But they couldn’t help. It wasn’t anywhere near a new or full moon tonight, and without that, they were powerless to enter the quarry or to act.
