Breaking Point (24 page)

‘OK, here goes,’ Charlie said. ‘Keep your eyes on him.’

The footage played again and Mina stared hard at the screen. A man in dark trousers, a jacket that could have been green, grey or light brown, his back to them, barely moving. Video images that could have been photographs, except for the occasional small movement, the folding of a newspaper, the glancing up at adverts and Tube maps, the turning of a page. Slowly, the man raised his right arm, from its position next
to
his leg, until it was pointing forward, bent at the elbow. Mina focused on the arm. It was centimetres from a woman facing him at a slight angle, who was busy tapping something into her mobile phone. Mina peered more closely. The duo seemed to touch, the woman swaying slightly. And then she saw what Charlie meant. It was nothing, the merest hint of a movement forward, the man’s arm extending and then retracting in a timeframe of a couple of seconds. It was incredibly subtle, but Charlie had spotted it. Mina had been blissfully unaware, trying to stop her sleep-deprived brain from wandering. But Charlie, who had probably managed even less sleep, had seen it straight away.

The woman on the screen started to look around, rapid, jerky movements of her head, slowly losing balance, struggling to stay upright, turning round to face the camera, her mouth open, a silent gasp or scream escaping her body, the colour draining, her eyes wide, dropping to one knee and then the other, starting to spasm and thrash. Mina was transfixed. They were watching someone die, taking her final breaths, her heart erratic and slowing, a systemic poison attacking the nervous system that was keeping her alive. Mina was caught, wanting Charlie to
turn
it off but also curious, needing to know how a human died from a small quantity of intravenous toxin, what it looked like to see a life drain away.

After another few seconds, Charlie said, ‘Watch the man. Look at his reaction.’

Mina dragged her eyes away from the woman. She was still alive, but wouldn’t be for long. Systems were shutting down, impulses short-circuiting, vessels constricting. The man above her had his back to the camera but had stepped away and towards the door. Mina tried to gauge his height. Five ten, maybe. His hair was mid brown and verging on the short. Not a lot to go on. But she knew what would happen now. They would have a time, an exact minute at which he stepped off a train on a known line. They would be able to follow him on the CCTV cameras dotted along the passageways, platforms and tunnels of the Tube. It would only be a matter of time before they got a better image of him, a face they could use, a description they could circulate.

The woman on the floor twitched a few times in quick succession. Passengers were mainly static, watching events unfold, a collective helplessness filling the carriage. The train slowed and stopped, and the doors opened.
Mina
watched the man calmly exit, not looking back, just heading away, swallowed by the crowd. His fifth victim lay on the dirty floor of a train, surrounded by strangers, alone and fighting for breath.

3

THE BIG THICK
hand of the lecture theatre clock pointed stubbornly at the number five. James Crannell began to wrap things up. Even though it was only twenty-five past nine, the first lecture of the day, he was already beginning to lose it. He had rambled, barely looking at his slides, hardly hearing the words that were stuttering out of his mouth. The background drone had grown louder and intensified, bouncing off the wooden surfaces of the room and ricocheting around the walls of his skull. James could no longer tell whether the sounds were inside his head or outside or both. All he could see, over and over again, were the words daubed on the side of his wife’s house.
Fucking scum live here
. Peaks of helpless anger and troughs of debilitating
depression
were washing through him on an hourly basis.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘that’s enough. Enough for one day. Go. Now.’ He waved his hands towards the exit. ‘Go. And do whatever.’

The students hesitated a second, trying to gauge whether he was infuriated or drunk or just losing it. Wide open eyes stared at him, inquisitive and interested. It was the only demonstration of pure curiosity he had witnessed from them throughout the whole lecture series.

‘Go on,’ he muttered. ‘There’s the door. It’s over.’ His chin sank into his chest. ‘It’s all over,’ he repeated to himself. Attacks. Punches, kicks, broken windows, graffiti, unspoken threats. A cumulative head fuck. Pressure building up inside him that had to be released. Unable to think clearly, let alone convey detailed principles of cancer biology to reluctant undergraduates.

The students began slowly to file out, casting him glances and raising eyebrows, looks of intense scrutiny. A black-haired female, petite, with bright red lipstick, walked over and touched his arm for a couple of seconds. A gesture of sympathy, of understanding. James almost grimaced. It felt too late, like he was past consolation.

He monitored the students out of the corner of
his
eye while he rounded up his papers. Useless papers he had barely glanced at, ad-libbing instead, going round in circles, repeating himself, his mind elsewhere, lost in the nightmare of what his life had become. And then one of the seventy students caught his attention. The queue to get out was moving slowly. Maybe twenty of them had left, another fifty or so filtering along the extended rows of wooden seats and desks, heading for the shallow steps lining the far side of the room. James thought quickly. He scanned the AV console and the plethora of switches and knobs of the newly refurbished theatre. A red button in a grey metal box to one side of the heating, ventilation and video projector controls. James turned a key and pressed the button hard. Immediately, an alarm began to sound inside the room. And then, ten seconds later, the sprinkler system kicked in. But James was already striding through the mass of students who were scattering in every direction, heading for the emergency doors, sprays of water narrowing their vision. He jumped over a desk and sprinted up the stairs.

The alarm wailed in James’s ear. He didn’t feel the water, didn’t taste the moisture in the air, didn’t see anything except what was at the back of the theatre. A male wedged in the middle of
a
long row of benched seating, standing up and attempting to leave. It was clear to James that he would be the very last to get out. And that amid all the pandemonium, he hadn’t noticed him approaching.

James let a couple of females past who were shielding their heads with their ring binders. And then he launched himself at the man who had belatedly spotted him. Sportswear. Baseball cap. Trainers. James knew the outline of his chin, the slightly flared nostrils, the sharp and worn teeth. The man tried to turn, but James was too quick. As he wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, he sensed that the balance of power was about to shift dramatically in his direction. He saw the expressions on his daughters’ faces, the fear they must have felt when this thug had stood in their back garden, their sadness that this man had written nasty words on the side of their house, and he began to squeeze as hard as he possibly could. The wanker was powerless, half trapped by the benched seating and its integral writing surface, James behind him, the man’s head in the crook of his arm.

James used his left hand to pull his grip tighter, his face contorting with the effort. The man flailed his arms but didn’t make contact. He was
strong
, pulling James back and forth, trying to dislodge him. But something was fuelling James: an inner power, a release of pent-up frustrations, a desire for revenge. He heard nothing and saw nothing. All that mattered was finishing the job. Killing this man. Holding on long enough that he stopped breathing. He blotted out the alarm, the water that was spraying over him, the fatigue in his muscles. The thug in the baseball cap was slightly bigger than him, but James was on fire. He was high. He wanted to kill. Every muscle fibre was alive, every neuron was sparking, every blood vessel was dilated, every cell in his body was glowing. The man landed two punches over his shoulder in quick succession. Both caught James on the side of the head. But there was no pain to feel. He was immune, a machine, an adrenalin-fuelled piece of equipment with one glorious task to fulfil.

‘You fucker,’ he said. ‘It’s time to die.’

The words were corny, maybe from a scene in a film lodged deep inside his brain, but he said them anyway. It was the truth, and it needed saying.

Strangling someone felt good. The man flailed again, less accurately. How long did it take? You could kill mice in the lab in seconds with the
right
drug. James clenched his teeth. He knew it wouldn’t take much longer. The man was fighting less. James sensed a life ebbing away.

Something Reuben Maitland had said drifted through his consciousness. Don’t let them reach your breaking point.

He smiled.

Why the hell not? he asked himself. If the breaking point felt this good.

4

MACLYN MARGULIS OPENED
and closed the mouth of his dead dog, making it say the words for him: ‘What the fuck do you want, Tommy?’

‘Nothing. I swear. Nothing at all.’

‘So why did you smash my master’s car up? Why am I dead now? Why did you slit my throat and kill me?’

Tommy stared from the dog to Maclyn and back again, wide-eyed and scared. The greyhound, with its narrow, pointed muzzle. Maclyn Margulis, with his thickset jaw and jet-black hair, his nose slightly pointed, blunted at the tip. Using the mutt like some kind of ventriloquist’s doll. Tommy was not used to the feeling that was starting to take hold of him. Fear. Pure instinctive fear that the situation was out of control and about to
get
worse. He had administered his fair share of beatings, had even broken the odd bone. But this was altogether different. In Maclyn Margulis’s hideout, a choker round his neck, the man in front of him clearly losing it. This wasn’t a warning or a slap on the wrists. This was real and personal, serious and nasty.

‘Come on!’ the dog screeched. ‘I’m fucking asking you!’

Tommy felt the choker tighten. Behind him stood a man as big and unpleasant as any he had ever come across. Valdek Kosonovski. He had seen him around, knew that he used to be part of a different gang, one you steered clear of if you could. But now, a pace to the rear, his hot breath on his neck, Tommy was quickly learning that not answering antagonized him.

He looked Maclyn in the eye, refusing to talk to the fucking dog. ‘Maclyn, this isn’t us. We have our concerns, you have yours. Believe me, Maclyn, we’ve got no interest in attacking you or taking you on or smashing—’

Without warning, the chain ripped into his neck. Tommy tried to breathe, but couldn’t. His mouth opened and closed uselessly, a fish on the river bank, silently choking. There was a growl behind him.

‘Talk to the fucking dog,’ it rumbled.

Tommy’s eyes bulged. He could see Asad Praz next to him, gazing into the middle distance, his pupils so dilated they looked like bullet holes. Praz, who was making a fortune in forged passports and imported narcotics. Ruthless and vicious, the head of a gang that used knives and machetes just to say hello. So scared he almost looked pale. Tommy thrashed around, hands tied behind his back, his legs bound at the ankles. The more he moved, the more he lost his balance, and the more completely the chain closed his throat.

He counted the seconds. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. His lungs wanted to explode. Maclyn was just watching him, deep blue eyes peering out from behind his dead fucking dog. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. There was a ringing in his ears. His eyes were spilling water down his face. How long? he asked himself. How long could he hang on? And if he ever got out of here alive, Maclyn Margulis was a marked man. If he didn’t get to him, the Praz boys would. Or any of the other men he had dragged off the streets and roughed up. Rumours all day of Maclyn’s gang pulling people out of cars or hauling them from their beds.

Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. The chain went slack and Tommy gasped for breath, a wild feral noise that echoed off the low ceiling of the room. He spat at the ground, tasting blood, the saliva dripping out viscous and red. He wanted to wipe his chin but couldn’t.

Maclyn began where he left off, opening and closing the dog’s narrow mouth. ‘So who the fuck did?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tommy muttered. His voice was rough, his throat dry and swollen, like his tonsils were infected with something unpleasant.

‘I think you do,’ the dog said.

‘I don’t know what to tell you …’

Tommy stared at the mutt. What the fuck was its name? A failed greyhound. A racing name that got shortened to something foreign-sounding. Maclyn was holding its long stretched-out body under his right arm and operating its mouth with his left hand.

‘Rico.’

‘
Rico
. I fucking don’t, I swear.’

Tommy glanced round at a noise from the far end of the elongated room. The metallic screech of the shutter opening. Two men emerged from the shadows, holding a third between them, his feet dragging across the floor, barely making
contact
. Tommy squinted, trying to make out who it was.

‘And my master’s fucking cigarettes, that you put Sol up to stealing. We’re still twenty grand out of pocket. What are you going to do?’

Tommy felt a flare of anger. He had managed to move some of the stuff on but Maclyn had got most of the shipment back and Tommy had lost a lot of face, had been forced to apologize and make amends. He was still deciding whether or not to have Sol killed for spilling the beans. He wondered briefly whether Maclyn was just fucking with him over the theft.

One glance at the man being dragged towards him confirmed that this was not the case. Warren Mathers. Nobody, not even Maclyn Margulis, fucked with the son of Eddy Mathers. Warren had a kind of London immunity, his dad’s name enough to make proper grown-up gangsters stay the hell away from him. Tommy saw the silent fury in his eyes, the red grazes on his cheek, the swelling on the bridge of his nose. Maclyn Margulis was declaring war. And when this all shook out, when the dust settled, when several of the bigger crews regrouped, there was going to be bloodshed on an epic scale. Tommy knew that killing Maclyn and destroying his gang would be
easy
. But after that, the trouble would really begin. Everyone was aware that Maclyn controlled a lot of markets. People would want a piece, and would feel they had a right after what he did to them. And no one would want to back down.