lucky.”
“Wait. Am I on speakerphone, Mr. Drake? Please, introduce me to your friends listening. Perhaps these are the same men who helped you to beat up my employee and scare off my girls? Perhaps feeling very pleased with themselves. Are they as brave without their masks and bats, Mr. Drake?”
Shelley experienced an odd sensation. He felt ashamed of himself.
“Gentlemen, that was good work you did smashing that equipment,” continued the caller, “and if ever I need some equipment smashing you can be sure I’ll call upon your services. But you see, there’s a snag. You now need to pay for all the damage you caused.”
Drake snorted as though to say, You should be so lucky, but the Chechen continued, “I would like twenty million please. Pay this money straightaway with no arguments and there will be no more bloodshed.”
Drake’s chewing habit always became more pronounced in times of high drama, and his jaw now moved rhythmically, like a man battling with gristle. For a moment Shelley wondered if he might simply blow his top there and then. To his credit, he maintained composure.
“Listen, my friend, I don’t know who you are, or who you fucking think you are, but last night was about teaching you a lesson, not the beginning of a beautiful new relationship, you get me? And I can tell you this much. Those men in the balaclavas? You’ve got them to thank for the fact that we didn’t go much, much further. What’s more, your lad who works there has got them to thank for the fact that it’s only a visit to the hospital he needs, and not one to the graveyard. Now I’m going to pretend I didn’t just hear your pathetic blackmail attempt and tell you to fuck right off.”
There was a pause. It was as though the Chechen decided to try again. “Mr. Drake, my name is Dmitry and I work for people whose wealth and influence equals yours. But the difference between them and you is the way in which they have acquired that wealth and gained that influence. You think that you have gone over to the other side, yes? That you have become a bad man? And you have, because it’s a bad thing you did, paying men in balaclavas to scare girls with baseball bats. But you probably think it doesn’t matter, because you think that your bad is a good-guy kind of bad, and anyway your wealth and influence will save you from your British justice system, and it probably will, because that is the way the world works. Your wealth and your influence can indeed save you from jail.
“But it will not save you from us, Mr. Drake. Those feeble men you have, ex-soldiers, old men thrown out of the army. Maybe they are tough guys who tell you they can keep you safe. But they can’t. Really they can’t, Mr. Drake. All I have to do is give the order. And we won’t just kill you, Mr. Drake, we’ll take you somewhere, and we’ll make you watch as we hurt and kill your loved ones, and then we’ll kill you, and we’ll do it slowly, over a period not of days or weeks, but of months.”
Shelley’s mind raced. This guy, how come he was telling them his name? More to the point, how did he know that Drake’s men were ex-military? A lucky guess, perhaps? Or something else?
“Tell you what, mate,” said Drake. His voice was rising. His cheeks had reddened. “You can fucking do one. Russian Mafia, is it? Something like that? You’re a fucking joke. Something out of a bad Sylvester Stallone movie. I tell you what, mate. You send your fellas here. Send as many as you like. I’ll be waiting. And I’ll come back at you twice as hard with everything I’ve got—and that’s everything I’ve got within the law and outside it, which is a lot more than you can muster, I promise you that. You think I’m underestimating you, do you? You fucking turkey. I’ll fucking show you how we do things in my country.”
There was a pause. Shelley wondered about the temperament of this man Dmitry. Was he going to lose it?
No. “Then let the battle commence,” said Dmitry.
The line went dead.
The sound of a car engine made all four men look in the direction of the front gates. They could see through the wrought iron to the approach road beyond.
About two hundred yards away was a metallic-blue BMW,