Man Down by Mark Pepper

Author:Mark Pepper [Pepper, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914480829
Publisher: Red Dog Press/Bloodhound Books

* * *

SPILLER’S HEART HAMMERED in his chest. His testicles felt normal, but the audacity of his planned speech was metaphorically inflating them to bursting point. He paced around the cellar as the phone chirped in his ear. The call was answered after five rings.

‘Hello, Charles Delaney,’ the man said, the high inflection on the second syllable of his surname making it sound like a character’s introductory line in a musical.

The jollity in Delaney’s voice pissed Spiller off. This could be a call imparting some terrible news. How could a person summon such groundless optimism in the face of dour possibilities?

‘I want to talk to you about your employee. Emma?’

‘Aha! Mr Spiller, I presume?’

Spiller felt like hanging up. Another plan was fraying. ‘Uh, how do you know my name?’

‘Emma called after you took my card away with you. She warned me you might be making contact.’

Spiller frowned. ‘And how does she know my name?’

Delaney chuckled briefly. ‘You shouldn’t give out business cards with your surname on them if you don’t want people to know your surname.’

His taxi cards. They were floating about everywhere. Doh. She’d used one to call him on Christmas Eve.

‘I want to meet up,’ Spiller said, taking back the reins. ‘I don’t know what Emma told you, but we have something to discuss.’

‘You’re right: you don’t know what Emma told me. And I would dearly love to make your acquaintance, Mr Spiller; I could do with a good laugh.’

‘Now… you listen—’

‘Delaney’s, the restaurant in the city centre. Know it? Be there at one a.m. That’s the one o’clock an hour after midnight. Buzz the door. I’ll be waiting.’

Spiller’s mouth was agape, ready to assert the scant authority that hadn’t yet been pilfered from him, but Delaney hung up. He stared at his mobile. ‘Arsehole.’

One a.m.—at least Delaney was taking him seriously. Customers would have left by then. They could have a decent conflab. It was a good sign. If Emma had told her boss the whole story and he’d simply not been interested in helping her, he would have said so on the call. And what did thirty grand mean to a man of his means? Petty cash. In fact, Spiller decided he’d go in at a hundred and see where negotiations went. In his head, a final figure of seventy-five seemed fair—if fair was a word you could apply to blackmail. Spiller smirked. Rich knob wouldn’t know what hit him.

Spiller headed back upstairs, sensing an end to his troubles could be in sight. How excellent it would be to use one problem to solve another.

He stopped on the final step. Damn. Without knowledge of his cunning scheme, Helen would still expect him to involve the police about the car-ramming. He had to call Bartoli. And Bartoli was someone he didn’t want to speak to any more than he had to. The man already had his suspicions, and this second attempt on the lives of Helen and the girls would only stoke them. You had to be pretty adamant a person had done something heinous to want to kill their family.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.