Blackwater - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,5

Then he kicked him as he lay there, twice before he even curled up. I should have stopped it then. Hell, I should have stopped him leaving the club and just insisted on taking him to hospital. I didn’t, though. I wanted a little revenge as well. I could have been killed that evening. I’m not proud of it, but there was a debt to be paid.

Another kick to the head and it should have been over, but two more muted thumps kept him down. I couldn’t see the man’s face, and I didn’t want to. I was slow holding my brother back, but in the end, when it was late, I did. I take comfort from that. I am not him, even when I’m full of anger and spite. I am not. He would have kicked that man to death. Maybe he did.

We left him there on the pavement and I did take my brother to hospital to be stitched and flirted with by a nurse. I read the next day’s papers looking for news of a killing in Camden, near the Underworld club. There was nothing.

When we met Denis, Carol still drew men in when she was hungry, though she’d learned a few things about keeping them at arm’s length as well. For years I hadn’t had to deal with one of her hangers-on, those peculiar males who would pretend to be a caring colleague or a friend while they waited for her to fall into bed with them. It was usually enough to have a quiet word, just to let them know I knew. I didn’t need help until we met Denis Tanter. Even then it might have been enough to turn a blind eye to a few afternoons in hotels until she had scratched her itch.

You think the first time is going to kill you, but it just doesn’t. The night is the worst one of your life, but when sleep does come it turns off your imagination. You wake up the next day and she’s there making breakfast and everything is all right again. I could have lived with that, I knew I could. The problem with Denis Tanter was that he wanted Carol all to himself.

CHAPTER THREE

DO YOU KNOW WHAT gives one man power over other men? You’d think it would be money, or some high position, being a judge perhaps, or a politician. In all honesty, when are you ever troubled by that kind of level? I’ve never had the Foreign Minister turn up at my door and insist I move my car. I think if he did I would probably call the police. I’m not saying they don’t have power, of a kind. Of course they do – too much of it, maybe. It just isn’t the sort of thing that presses you down on a daily basis. You don’t have them come into your house and take your wallet, if you see what I mean.

There is a lesser place, though, underneath the courts and security guards, right down where it can really tear the spleen right out of you. It doesn’t take an army and it certainly doesn’t take enormous amounts of money. For just a few hundred pounds a week, one man can hire another one to punch and kick and break, maybe even to rape or rob, if that was needed. Just one man to do whatever he’s asked. That’s all it takes. I can only imagine what it must be like to have one.

Men like Denis Tanter spend a pleasant evening in a restaurant, and by the time they get home, someone they want to frighten has had his door kicked in and his fingers broken by a complete stranger. You can’t go to the police because you know they’ll make it worse the second time. You know that fear is usually enough. Most men aren’t able to stop one violent criminal holding them down and battering their head so hard on the kitchen tiles that they break. Most men care about a woman, or a child, something that grabs them and squeezes their chest in terror if they’re even mentioned. You don’t get fear like that from politicians or judges. You know they have limits, no matter what happens. If you walk free out of court, you don’t expect the police to send men round to your house that night to give you a bit of justice.

I’d actually met Denis’s man, Michael, at the New Year’s Eve