Chapter 3

Bushwhacked!

TIM THOUGHT no more about the incident with Abbey for at least a couple of months. It was just a few days past mid-December when he was forcefully reminded of it again. Once more, as was his habit on a Friday night, he left Crystal’s about midnight or so while the place was still buzzing inside, and made his way across the dark car park towards his car, parked in the far corner where he hoped it wouldn’t get bumped by careless motorists. As he walked, he buttoned his coat up against the biting cold wind and began pulling his leather driving gloves onto each hand in turn. He clicked his Jaguar saloon ignition key and the car lights flashed, showing him clear silhouettes of three guys standing in front of the car, each brandishing what could only be baseball bats.

“Hi, arsehole,” Toby snarled, “This is pay-off night.” He slapped his baseball bat against the palm of his other hand, making an obscene smacking noise. Tim’s first thoughts were that if he tried to punch his way out of this situation, they had numerical advantage and could easily outreach him to pick him off with their weapons. Tim only had his fists and a small pocket penknife, which he only used to peel apples or sharpen pencils at work, with a good wipe over between each unrelated task. He thought he might get a couple of telling blows home with his fists but there would only be one outcome if he stood toe to toe with them here and now on their chosen battleground. He needed to reduce the odds more in his favour. So he clicked his locking key, which distracted them slightly as his car flashed behind them, while he turned tail and ran out of the nearest car park exit, along the road away from the lounge bar. They followed but were at least a dozen or so footsteps behind him. Tim was glad he had kept up his regular gym and roadwork, and easily maintained his pace, even though the hounds on his heels were roughly half his age. A half-dozen blocks down the road was his preferred field of battle, given the limited choices immediately at his disposal. It was a short dark alleyway leading to a soft drinks company, formerly built as a dairy. Basically the alley was a dead-end. There was an easily climbable eight-foot high chain-link fence on the left-hand side of the alley leading to a parking area for a builders’ merchant and a further similar fence on the other side of the car park, which he believed led to some domestic back gardens. It was a possible escape route if things didn’t pan out as he hoped.

Tim increased his pace to open up a bigger gap, without much danger of them losing sight of him. As soon as he entered the unlit alley into the shadow of the tall office building on the right-hand side, he stopped. As quietly as he could, he pulled one of the three heavy wheeled bins out from under the fire-escape, where he knew he would find them, and gently laid it down flat in the path he had just taken. It was full of rubbish and heavy, anyone running into it would fall straight over it, possibly incapacitating himself in the process. His eyes were beginning to get used to the gloom and he took the heavy rubber lid off one of the conventional dustbins under the stairway and held it up ready in his left hand like a shield, as he took up a position just behind and slightly to the left side of the fallen bin.

The first guy who rounded the corner was Toby. He was the one most determined to catch Tim, the other two were probably slightly less motivated, and Tim hoped they would be easier to discourage. The youth was running at full pelt. Blindly, Toby ran straight into the bin and fell full-length over the obstacle, dropping his bat in the process as he tried to cushion his fall with his hands and landed heavily. Tim ignored him initially. The other two followed just behind Toby and Tim faced up to them. He pushed the bin lid into the face of the guy on the left and threw a punch at the face of the right-hand guy. The one on the left received the lid in his face and chest but recovered sufficiently to swing his bat at Tim’s head, hitting his forehead above the left eye with a glancing blow as Tim pushed as hard as he could against the thug’s chest. Meanwhile, Tim’s fist hit the right-hand guy full in the face and he went down for the count, his limp body crashing into the bin. Tim recognised him as the first guy he had punched in the lounge bar a couple of months earlier, when he had broken his nose. Tim guessed the guy must have been born with a glass jaw!

Still pushing with the dustbin lid against the chest and face of the left-hand guy, Tim followed up this up with a rib-challenging right-hander into his body. The attacker dropped the bat and, as his knees buckled, Tim hit him again with the end of the bin lid on the top of his head and the assailant went down like a sack of spuds to join his mate in the land of nod.

Meanwhile, Toby was swearing and trying to get back up from his prone position, his legs slipping for grip on the cobbled surface of the ancient alley. Tim kicked him in the face and followed up with several kicks to the body. Toby lay still. Tim surveyed the scene and all three potential thugs were on the floor either groaning or comatose. This was a much better outcome than he had expected at the outset, if he was honest, and had been resolved in a matter of seconds. Other than the slight glancing blow to his forehead, Tim was unharmed, his leather glove protecting his fist from damage.

He didn’t need to think much about what he was going to do. Tim picked up Toby’s loose bat with his gloved hands and hit him quite hard three or four times about the body, although not his head. Tim did the same to the other two. He justified his action as being appropriate to the kind of treatment he had expected to receive from them if they had caught up with their intended target in Crystal’s car park. Later, when he had calmed down somewhat from the adrenaline rush, Tim was not so sanguine about those subsequent actions.

They were all taller than Tim and half his age. If they had got him down they would almost certainly have done him some serious damage with those three clubs.

Compared to the rest of his family who were all tall, Tim took after his mother and felt he was the runt of the litter. That’s one reason why he took up boxing while he was still at school, so he could be self-reliant. To some degree he had even felt he was an outsider in his own family and needed to fend for himself, especially as his two youngest brothers would gang up on him. During his childhood, they didn’t actually have a boxing gym in the Smith neighbourhood, so he caught a bus straight after school once or twice a week and didn’t get home until late. That effort had the benefit of making him pretty independent from an early age. He put in a lot of cross-country running too, as well as skipping in the gym. He lifted weights as part of his regular exercise routine. This regimen gave him a good balance of upper and lower body strength, made him light on his feet and had given him the self-confidence that he felt needed a boost during his formative childhood and teen years. You have to agree it helped in his adult life too.

He still went to Jim’s Gym regularly, although Jim retired ten years ago and successful businessman Tim Smith bought up the place for a song. Steve Cartwright, a Boxing Olympic bronze medal winner at his weight, fought half-a-dozen professional fights before suffering a detached retina, which forced him to give up his own dreams; had given the gym a new lease of life with the youth and children members doing well in competitions. Steve kept the same old faded sign up outside as homage to the man who built it up from nothing. Tim had brought Steve in initially to manage the place and buy a half-ownership from Tim with a bank loan from a local bank. Tim assumed that once Steve finished paying off his loan he would approach Tim to buy out the remainder. When the thought first occurred to Tim, he believed he might simply hand the business over to him on a handshake, so long as Steve continued to give him free membership!

Tim stripped Toby of his clothes until he was completely naked, spreading out his coat and placing the would-be assassin’s shoes, shirt, pants and trousers onto the coat. He stuffed the socks into Toby’s mouth and used his small penknife, which he habitually maintained with as sharp an edge as he could, to cut off the sleeves of Toby’s shirt and used one to tie his hands behind his back and the other his ankles together. Tim proceeded to do the same using the shirts of the other two guys and threw the three clothing bundles over the gateway into what used to be the old dairy. The present owners had a solid steel gate with razor wire on the top and the clothes wouldn’t normally be discovered until reopening on Monday morning. Tim had already emptied their pockets of contents as well as removed their wallets and mobile phones.

Tim used each their mobile phones to take several shots of all three of them, having previously moved the naked bodies into a somewhat amusing and highly embarrassingly compromising sexual position. He then used one of the phones to dial 999 for the ambulance service, telling them that there had been a fight in that alley and three people were in urgent need of medical attention. It was too cold a frosty night to leave them there naked until morning. Tim emptied their wallets of cash and dropped the empty wallets down a drain on the way back to the lounge bar. He put the cash, including the change from their pockets into his jacket pocket, keeping it separate from his own money. Their keys and all other personal items, including credit, membership cards and driver’s licences, he dropped into various drains, litterbins and domestic dustbins while he walked back to the lounge bar.

By the time Tim got back to Crystal’s, two ambulances roared past the club towards that alleyway. At the entrance to Crystal’s, as he re-entered the lounge, Billy the bouncer on the door nodded in the direction Tim had come. He knew that Tim had left the bar less than twenty minutes earlier and they had said a final goodnight to each other at the time.

“Your handiwork, Tim?”

“Not prepared to say,” Tim grinned, “You know how I hate to deliberately mislead anyone.”

“Me too,” Billy replied, “Still, it was silly of me to ask such a stupid question. I know for a fact you only stepped out of the bar for a minute for a breath of fresh air and I’m certain you’ve been in my line of sight for the last 60 seconds or so since you left the club.”

“Thanks Billy, I appreciate it, mate.” He patted the doorman on his broad shoulders before re-entering the club.

Tim ordered a cup of coffee from Mel behind the bar and waved Pete over from the dance floor area once he had managed to catch his eye. When they got together, Tim replenished Pete’s drink and quietly explained the situation he found himself in, explained the photos on the phones and what he intended doing with them. So Pete took two of the phones, collected one of their mutual mates, Gordon, and they went out to the Gents toilets with the mobiles in hand. When Mel brought Tim’s coffee over to him she noticed that he had a cut within the hairline trickling blood over his left eye. Without any ceremony she pulled him into the brighter lights of the bar’s kitchen and cleaned up the wound for him.

“What are you getting yourself into, Tim? This is not like you at all.”

“Those kids I had a run in with a couple of months ago, if you remember, tried to jump me in the car park. I managed to lure them away and turn the tables on them, more by luck than anything else.”

“Billy and me, we got you covered, Tim.”

“Thanks, Mel, you’re a sweetheart.”

While being treated in the kitchen, Tim went through the single mobile phone he had retained, Toby’s, and sent a couple of the photos he had taken to everybody stored on Toby’s directory. Once they were sent, he pulled out the battery and sim card and passed them to Mel to put in her rubbish bin. She was in continual radio contact with Billy on the front door, so Tim guessed she knew what was going on, as she dropped the parts into the dish-washing machine for a wash-cycle before disposing of the bits and pieces in a bin without further comment, other than her familiarly sweet disarming smile. If only she wasn’t spoken for, Tim thought. Her long-time boyfriend owned a pub as well as the lounge bar and they divided their working time between the two busy, successful establishments.

Gordon and Pete returned from their efforts in the toilets. Gordon waved at Tim with a broad grin on his face as he returned to his lady on the dance floor. Pete came over and confirmed to Tim that they had sent the pictures to everyone in each directory, then pulled the phones apart and flushed everything but the batteries down the toilet. By the time Pete came over to the bar Tim was busy stuffing notes and change from his jacket pocket into the collection box for dogs for the blind. As a rough count he made it in excess of eighty quid, a generous, if not exactly acknowledgeable, contribution from the three now incapacitated, probably hospitalised donors. After relaxing with another couple of coffees, Tim bade farewell to Mel, waved goodbye to Pete and Gordon in the midst of their dance floor gyrations and shook Billy warmly by the hand in the cold December night just outside the main doors. He was a hardy soul that Billy, thought Tim, mind you, he was a big lad with more than ample built-in insulation.

Next day was Saturday, a very busy day for Tim and his team in the car showroom, even this close to Christmas, when buying cars for delivery before the magic day was cutting it pretty fine. There were always customers trying to buck the trend, though. However, his trading time was somewhat curtailed that day: Tim had two additional non-automobile-related visitors, one who was expected, the other not so.

Detective Sergeant Oliver Norris was not a very nice man, Tim decided on first acquaintance. There was little the officer could do first thing that morning as he had found that Tim wasn’t at home when he called round at his place of residence, while the car dealer was obviously hard at work. The relaxing weekend for the car salesman didn’t usually begin until Saturday evening. Then Norris had gone onto Crystal’s and didn’t manage to raise anyone there until just before noon, when Mel came in to supervise the clean up and re-stock ready for the next night. Mel gave the policeman her statement that as far as she was concerned Tim Smith had been in the bar continually from about 10pm through until about 2am in the morning. She was able to itemise exactly what drinks he had, mostly espresso coffee, and the exact times he purchased them, from the till roll, showing a continuous record through his time there. Mel also pointed out that Billy the doorman and regular customers including Pete would be able to corroborate her statement and that both would be in the lounge later in the evening, if the Sergeant cared to call back then.

The detective finally caught up with Tim early that afternoon at the car showroom. The very first thing he said got Tim’s back up more than just a tad.

“Timothy Charles Smith, I am Detective Sergeant Norris and I need to know your movements last night between the hours of midnight and midnight-thirty. I would like to say at the outset that I’ve been very familiar with the criminal antics of your father and pair of troublesome brothers over the years and I’m looking forward to pinning this particular unsavoury incident on the third brother for a change, based on the sworn testimony of the victims of a cowardly attack and robbery last night,” announced the pompous policeman.

“Tell me Sergeant Norris,” Tim replied, “why are you asking about my movements? What makes you think I can help you with your enquiries?”

“Don’t try and deny it, sunshine,” the officer snarled, “You’re the ringleader of a vicious gang that beat up, stripped off their clothing, restrained and hospitalised three innocent young college boys, who were otherwise going about their lawful business. When questioned this morning, all three victims have consistently named you, Timothy Smith, as the ringleader of this no doubt numerous, vicious and bloodthirsty gang.” Tim asked, “Who were these supposed victims?”

“I cannot divulge that information at this stage.”

“Well, if the victims were stripped and assaulted, can you tell me what type of ‘unsavoury’ injuries were inflicted by this gang on these innocent lads? You make it sound like they were, how shall I say it, sexually molested?”

“No, no, not exactly, but all their clothes were removed, along with their watches, money, mobile phones, personal documents and credit cards; and they were subjected to ... well, indignities.”

“Very interesting,” Tim commented, “And what connection am I supposed to have with these victims? And exactly what links does this gang, that I am presumed to lead or hang around with, possibly have with the unnamed victims?”

“I cannot say at this point in our enquiries.”

“In that case, can you tell me exactly when and where such incident was supposed to have taken place?”

“In Old Dairy Alley, off West Street, between midnight and about quarter past twelve when the ambulance service was called to the scene.”

“That alley, isn’t that the one that leads to nowhere but that bottling plant, which I presume is closed at that time during the weekend?”

“Yeah, that’s the place.”

“So, what kind of lawful going about their business activities were these three youths pursuing in that dead-end alley? Were they already naked when they were attacked? They couldn’t have been chased in there as everyone knows it leads nowhere, they would have run in any other direction, or more likely split up. Very strange, Sergeant, were no clues left behind at all?”

“Well, the three baseball bats used to beat them with, they were left at the scene by the attackers.”

Tim smiled and asked, “Sergeant Norris, why do you think exactly three baseball bats were found with three so-called victims, when they were apparently outnumbered by a large gang? Surely the gang would have taken away their weapons of choice, that they brought with them, when they departed?”

Norris was silent on the subject and looked clearly uncomfortable.

“Mmm, while I have nowhere near the degree of experience of investigating incidents such as this as you may well have had,” Tim declared with a relaxed smile, “Don’t you think it as strange as I do that this well-armed and readily-equipped gang took the trouble to remove from the scene all their victims’ clothes and presumably all their other possessions, while the same number of bats corresponding to the number of victims were inexplicably left behind by the attackers?” Still no answer came from the detective, who stood there with pursed lips and furrowed brow, probably wishing the floor would open beneath him.

“On reflection I can only assume,” continued Tim in full flow, “That you are still awaiting the fingerprint results on those bats and are just marking time questioning and eliminating those innocent parties such as myself from your enquiries until such corroborations are eventually available to act upon. Is that correct, Sergeant Norris?”

Tim got the impression from Norris’s face that he was either unaware of whose fingerprints were on the weapons or whether anyone at the station had even bothered to put the baseball bats through the checking process. Tim could read his visitor’s bitter disappointment of not being able to tie another of the infamous Smith family of troublemakers into his charge book.

Norris drew Tim’s attention to the cut on his head and slightly bruised forehead. Tim smiled at that and explained this as being an accident at his home, leaving one of his kitchen cupboards open and walking into it. He revealed that it happened just as he was going out on Friday evening and Mel at the club had noticed that it has started bleeding on serving his first cup of espresso, and treated him to first aid in the bar kitchen.

“Once you have some proper evidence other than the unreliable ramblings of a few unknown youths, please get back to me and I will happily appraise you of my movements; until then I am unwilling to answer to what amounts to unsubstantiated rumours. Good day, Sergeant, I have a lot of paperwork to do before I finish up today.” The officer left with his tail between his legs.

The next visitor into Tim’s office was completely unexpected, Roger Jones. Now, when Tim spoke to Abbey that Saturday night some two months earlier, he hadn’t mentioned that he had met her father twice since Abbey purchased her car. Roger had come in ostensively for his own test drives of both a Jaguar luxury saloon and the sports car that Abbey had taken out for a drive a few days earlier. Although he didn’t say so in as many words on that test drive, Tim thought that he was trying to warn him off any involvement Tim might be considering with Roger’s wife, Jenny. Roger had conveyed, in between the lines, that he was actually quite concerned, in light of his research into his perceived rival’s former reputation, which led him to believe Tim had been and as far as he knew he was still something of a playboy. Tim had to admit to himself that he would’ve held those same concerns against him if he was in Roger’s shoes. If Tim had a wife of his own, whether she was as fine as Jenny or not, he might very well have warned off any recognised or suspected rivals himself. Tim’s attitude to sharing his toys was well known to his family; and well, that philosophy naturally extended in adulthood to his own girlfriends and other people’s spouses, too. Again, without making any direct reference to Roger’s better half, Tim had directed Roger to refine his research, which should lead him to realise that Tim’s lifestyle, while far from exemplary in the past, had always distinctly and particularly excluded married or otherwise women attached to a relationship, from those plentiful willing single females with whom he had at some stage or other pursued any romantic entanglements. Roger had considered what Tim had said and followed this up with an invitation to play a round of golf with him the following week, it still being late summer at the time. Tim had agreed to the game and contrived to end the match as a tie by drawing his ball just wide of the target on an easily missable putt on the last hole. Tim and Roger had continued to shadow box over a few drinks at the nineteenth hole. Although both these meetings between Tim and Roger ended positively and they had clearly enjoyed each other’s company, Tim reflected afterwards that he hadn’t even consciously attempted to sell him any more cars! Tim didn’t mention either of those meetings to Abbey because Roger had specifically asked him not to discuss them with either Abbey or Jenny, and Tim preferred an uncomplicated life anyway. He hadn’t seen Jenny since the day she dropped Abbey off to collect her new car two days after the sale, so he assumed that the Jones’ had accepted any misunderstandings had been as innocent.