Chapter 6

"She's dead!" he announced.

"Teach her to hang around with a slime-ball like this. Get her the fuck out of here," another voice said.

I didn't believe what I had just seen happen. I think I went to move or say something, but Kathy who apparently had been watching me closely, grabbed my arm and stopped me in my tracks. I really hadn't expected anyone would actually get seriously hurt, let alone killed, especially a woman.

"You've killed her!" Peter Garfield exclaimed. The man's eyes were as big as dinner plates as he stared at the inert body of the girl for a few seconds and then he appeared to try and look at everyone else in the warehouse at once. Like me, he was having trouble believing his own eyes and understanding what had just happened.

A man who'd been standing beside Pat went over and joined the one by the woman. He bent down and felt for the girl's pulse, then looked at Pat shaking his head.

Damn it, that was unnecessary." Pat said, "You better get her out of here and put her somewhere where she won't be found. Wait now, you'd better use this bugger's car."

Between them the two men hoisted the girl's body and carried it out of the warehouse. A little later we heard a car drive away.

"Unfortunate and unnecessary, she just had to be patient whilst we had out little chat with you and then the pair of you could have gotten back to whatever you were doing when we disturbed you," Pat said, turning his attention back to the man tied to the chair. "Now let's get down to business. Are you going to be co-operative or do we have to get all unnecessary with you as well?"

"I don't know what you could want with me?" Garfield replied.

"Just the answers to a few questions. A couple of months ago you went to England." Pat said.

"I go there often... to do business."

"Ah, but on this trip you used an alias. You used the name John Carter. Are you with me now?" Pat asked.

Garfield looked like he was thinking for a few seconds and then said, "Um, yes. I went to see my uncle. He's very ill and he asked me to do something for him."

"What?"

"Nothing much. It's personal family business; it was nothing important," Garfield replied.

"Not to you maybe, but let's say it could be important to me. Now what did you do for your uncle?

"Nothing. I told you I just collected a package for him and had it delivered."

"Where?"

"I don't remember the address. It was already written on the package and I just gave it to the taxi driver to deliver. That's all there was to it."

"What was in the package?"

"I don't know. It could have been anything."

"Now I know you're lying to me and I don't like that," Pat retorted.

Without Pat saying anything, a man stepped forward and to my utter horror, placed the muzzle of the biggest handgun I'd ever seen in my life against Garfield's knee.

"Let's just kneecap the bastard, that'll loosen his tongue," the man said as he did so.

Once again I went to intervene but Kathy held my arm firmly. "They know what they are doing. Leave them to it," she whispered to me.

Don't be so bloody daft, you mad bugger. You'll blow his bloody leg off with that thing," Pat retorted. "Who's got a nine-millimetre? We'll start on his ankles first."

The man with the big gun stepped back making a comment that showed he was disappointed. Then another man went over to Garfield and pointed a much smaller gun at his ankle and I watched him make a deliberate show of pulling back the hammer. But before he fired Garfield began whimpering.

"The bugger's pissed himself!" The man suddenly proclaimed.

"No, don't shoot me! I'll tell you anything you want to know. It was a video tape," Garfield hurriedly blurted out through his tears.

"What of?"

"I don't know. I never looked at it," Garfield mumbled.

To me Garfield looked like he'd suddenly turned into a mental wreck and was completely terrified. Mind you, I can't say that I wasn't near needing a change of underwear.

"Why did your uncle send it?"

"I don't know that either. He just asked me to get it from his office at one of his companies and then have it delivered.

For the next hour or so the questioning went on. Garfield told us that he'd picked up the tape from the premises of a small film production company his uncle owned. This confused me somewhat because, through my investigations on the mainland, I thought I knew every company that the five had connections with. To my knowledge this film company wasn't on the list. I had to wonder if it was the company that had produced the video.

Garfield went on to say that the film was in a safe in his uncle's private office at the company's offices. We also learned that there were many more tapes along with a lot of files in the safe and that he had instructions to post off several of the other tapes after his uncle had passed on. All the rest of the stuff in the safe, he was to bring back over to Ireland and pass on to a man called Harcourt, when he visited Garfield's hotel.

Pat shot a quick look in my direction and I nodded back to him.

"You know this man Harcourt?" Pat demanded of Garfield.

"Yes he's one of my uncle's business associates. He stays at my hotel often and has conferences with some other men.

"List the men's names to me?"

Garfield suddenly turned non-co-operative again. "I can't talk about them! They are powerful men with connections. They could have me killed!"

"And you think we won't kill you if you don't tell us what we want to know?" Pat asked. "Look, we've no interest in hurting you if we don't have to. Unless you tell these people, they will never know where we got the information. So they will have no reason to kill you. We on the other hand have reason to make your dying very slow and painful if we don't get the information we require."

Again without Pat's prompting the man with the nine-millimetre had stepped forward and even through the balaclava we all could see the smile on his lips as he bent down towards Garfield's ankle and pointed the gun.

"All right, all right, I'll tell you. But no one will ever know I told you?"

"You have my word as an Irishman," Pat replied.

Garfield went on to list the other three men who been in that interview with Emily. He claimed he had little knowledge of their business dealings. He did volunteer that he thought that amongst other things, they had some connections with drug smuggling. Sometimes people from certain South American countries visited the hotel at the same time as the four men. And they were often in private conference with each other.

Somewhere during Pat's questioning, Garfield had mentioned what he called the women.

"Tell me about these women?" Pat suddenly demanded.

Garfield looked confused, as he obviously thought the women were pretty unimportant. "They're just women that they bring along, you know, for entertainment."

"What? Hookers? Prostitutes?" Pat asked.

"No, I wouldn't say that they were on the game. I'm pretty sure of that. They're not the type. And besides I don't think any of them wanted to be there or be treated as they are."

"You're not explaining yourself very well," Pat said.

"Look, they weren't tarts. They were ladies, housewives and the like. They don't normally dress like tarts or behave like them until they are made to."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the women - sometimes they have their husbands with them - would turn up at the hotel on their own. You know not with Harcourt and his crowd. They even pay for their own rooms. Then when those four and their associates turn up the women would be sent to whoever wanted them. One night I heard one of Harcourt's men order one woman to strip naked in the bar and then he had some other woman's husband fuck her from behind whilst she gave her husband a blow job. The poor woman was devastated and so was her husband, but they did as they were told. They do that sort of thing all the time."

"What? Are they perverts or something? Why would they degrade people like that?"

"Because they can. That's what you've got to understand about these people. They are very powerful people and they get their kicks out of making people do anything they want them to do."

Pat turned and looked at me, but he didn't say anything. We both realised how close Emily had come to becoming one of their victims.

"Is it always the same women?"

"No, I'm not sure how many different ones I've seen. Certainly I've seen over fifty and could be as many as a hundred. They aren't all English either. There have been Americans, Germans, and French; well, I think they've come from just about every country in Europe and Scandinavia. But there's been no Irish that I have noticed. Although it isn't always obvious who is one of their victims, if you understand me. They don't wear a badge or anything and often the husbands are with them. Or someone who purports to be the husband anyway."