The Opposite of Mercy

by John Connor

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

'A first-rate thriller with a terrific climax' Sunday Telegraph The true value of a human life is being tested to its limit in this sharp, page-turning thriller... When soldier Paul Curtis, recently returned from active duty, is approached covertly by an old school friend's father and asked for assistance he falters only momentarily before agreeing to help. His old friend, Chris, is dating Lara, a beautiful British Asian woman whose brother, Pasha Durrani, is furious about their relationship. As Paul steps into the breach it soon becomes clear that this is no low-level domestic disagreement. Durrani is heavily involved in organised crime, the roots of which lead back to a powerful terrorist network in Pakistan - and Lara has been offered to these people as a prize. Suddenly, Paul, Chris and Lara find themselves taking on a force more deadly and widespread than they could ever have imagined. By turns gripping and terrifying, THE OPPOSITE OF MERCY is a sharp, insightful and compulsive thriller.

Release date: June 23, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 321

Sample

1

Saturday, 29th May, 2010

It took them just over an hour and half to get there, Paul driving fast, well over the limit all the way. It was still dark as they left Halifax – a chill, cloudless night with a full moon – but the sky turned grey around four thirty, and by the time they were past York it was blood red out to the east, shading into daylight above them.

The light made things worse. It had been about fourteen hours since the beating, leaving Paul’s face bruised, one eye closed and a tooth broken. Despite that, and because the roads were empty, they had made good time on the motorways up to York, only having to slow on the narrower, twisting road across the moors.

The twenty miles across the tops, from Pickering to Whitby, then north to the tiny village of Silton, took an eternity, the huge bare hillsides stark in the periphery of his restricted vision, all his concentration tight on the thin band of tarmac. As they came out of Silton, dropping towards the coast, they sank into a thick fog, blotting out the weak dawn light. Paul switched the fog lights on and kept his eyes on the twisting stream of gleaming cat’s-eyes.

Nearer the house, as they came over a rise, the fog thinned enough for them to glimpse the chimneys and bunkers of the chemical works, off to the left. So he knew he was on the right track. There was a mine, on land which had once been part of the Rathmore estate, and next to it a small industrial complex owned now by a multinational. Eight years ago, when Paul had first come here, the place had still belonged to the Rathmore family and had been operating at full capacity. Even at night he could remember it spewing out a yellow gas, polluting the darkness with halogen light and the grinding noise of heavy machinery. The real Rathmore. In darkness it had looked like a vision of hell – belching flames and fumes. Now it was all but shut down, in the process of being sold again, or decommissioned.

The road fell away from it about two miles out from the house and climbed another hill, up towards woods. They took a dirt track running between high hedges shrouded in mist. If the hill hadn’t been there then you would be able to see the entire chemical plant from the front of the house. As it was, the hill and woods screened everything off, making the house difficult to find if you didn’t know it was there, even with a car. Paul was navigating from memory because the satnav showed nothing but a blank space.

The main building stood by itself, isolated, woods to both sides. From the end of the dirt track it looked empty and unused, looming at them out of the fog. The woods were over four hundred years old, a mix of conifer and oak, towering over the gables so that the place was buried in their shadow. No lights on, no signs of life. Paul stopped the car in the gravel semicircle beyond the front door and stepped into the cold, damp air. He could smell the sea.

He waited for his eyes to adjust, at first keeping his torch switched off and concentrating with his ears. Past the edge of the gravel, where the neglected flower beds straggled into the woods, he couldn’t see much. No movement though, no indication there was anyone out there besides himself. There was enough light for him to see that the front door was wide open. That set his pulse off.

It had been eight years since he had last stood where he was now and he’d been with Chris and Lara then. They had all been sixteen years old. The place looked only a bit smaller than he remembered. The central part, with the flight of eighteen stone steps up to the gaping door, gave onto two symmetrical wings, which curved back towards the woods. Twenty bedrooms over four floors, everything made of Portland stone. There were tall ornamental pillars either side of the door and according to the stone above one of them, they’d been there since 1826. Chris always called the place Rathmore – just the single, simple name – but the words carved by the date above the door were actually Rathmore Hall.

Paul switched the torch on and looked behind him to where the policeman – DS Andy Macall – had got out and was standing by the open passenger door of the Focus. ‘They’re not here,’ Macall said, voice too loud, disappointment obvious. ‘No one’s here. The place is deserted.’

‘The car could be round the other side,’ Paul said, whispering. ‘You check. I’ll do the house.’

He set off without waiting for agreement. He should tell Macall about The Boat House, he knew – warn him. But in his head he was still trying to work out whether he was going to let Macall go down there. He was still trying to work out whether he could trust Macall at all. If Chris and Lara had come back here then they wouldn’t be in this place – the collapsing nineteenth century pile – they’d be down below, at the bottom of the cliffs, in the newer place.

In 2001 – when they’d first come here – only the ground floor of the great house was still accessible. The structure was already decaying, plaster coming off the walls, ceilings sagging, the roof leaking, weeds growing up the exterior, some of the windows broken. It looked worse now. The ground floor windows were boarded up, the upper floor window panes broken, graffiti low down on one wall. There was a prominent alarm box to the right of the door, but it couldn’t have been working. Phil Rathmore – that was Chris’s dad’s name, the same name as the house and the chemical companies – had wanted to sell the place as soon as his elder brother was killed, but there were complications to do with tax liabilities and grants. Meanwhile he had let Chris use it every now and then. Part of the price of buying his silence. At least, that was how Chris had put it. Maybe that had been true, maybe not, but that’s how they ended up there: Chris, Lara and Paul. Three sixteen-year-old kids from suburban Manchester let loose on an abandoned country manor. Absurd. Maybe Chris and Lara had been used to it, but Paul had felt like a burglar just standing in the hall.

Out the front, beyond the terrace and lawns, there was a twisting path through a mile of woods to cliffs, then rickety wooden steps down to a cove with a short private beach and a boat house. That’s what they called it – The Boat House – though there were no boats there. It was a proper house, with five rooms, but it was a thirties’ design, partly on concrete piles – like a pier – extending towards the beach. That was where they had stayed. There were beds and cooking facilities, even a bar. The beach was rocky and boulder-strewn, sloping away at a steep gradient, but the pier part of the house ended right over the edge of it, so that the tide would come in at night and if it was really high the water would be close enough to wake you.

Paul got his mind back to the open front door. He had an irrational feeling of dread as he went up to it. Enough to stop him and make him look back at Macall, still fumbling in the car for the other torch. Then, as he turned back to the opening, the smell hit him – faint traces of it reaching his nose before he could even see inside. Not something overpowering, but a very particular smell.

A freaky juxtaposition. Standing in North Yorkshire, in that place – a place he knew so well – but with a smell like Afghanistan in his nose, the noise of his heart in his ears. He stepped up and moved the torch beam through the space beyond the door, but he didn’t need it – it was gloomy inside, but there was enough light to see this. He switched the torch off. He felt the ice run into his blood.

An unmistakeable, disgusting, stinking mess. The mess that killing leaves behind – at least that kind of killing – hands-on, protracted, violent. It took time and strength to put someone down like that. He could read how much time and strength it had taken by looking at the trail left behind: spattered up the walls, across the carpets and sheeting, footprints smeared through it, finger marks clawing at the walls and floor where the victim had tried desperately to escape. And all the time the heart pumping out blood – litres of it; a slippery, congealing slime of black and red that even after a few hours begins to reek enough to make you gag.

But this was fresh. What he had in his nose was the specific smell of a stricken human who had recently bled to death. Pulse racing, heart in his mouth, he picked out the trail, took a deep breath, then stepped over the threshold. Ears straining into the silences, he followed the trail through the cavernous, empty rooms.

The path of spilled blood led right up to a shape lying at the very back of the place. Whoever it was had managed to get through the hall and two rooms, right to where a set of tall, arched, glass doors opened onto a terrace with a view across an ornamental lawn. Maybe they’d thought to get out there, to smash the glass. There were streaks of blood down the pane, as though a hand had slipped across it. Paul looked through the glass. Outside the fog was shifting and stirring. He began to shiver, then tried to step forward.

But he couldn’t move, couldn’t get any nearer.

He was terrified. Because in his head all he could think was that it must be Chris, or Lara. He started to take huge, gasping breaths, his heart pounding furiously. He was caught in a split second of suspended time, with all the chaos and insanity of the last seven days rushing around him. This was where it all led. To this moment. To Chris, or Lara, to one of them lying here.

He had a sudden, unwanted image of them as they had been eight years ago. Down by The Boat House, still alive and laughing. They were sitting on the rocks, the tide out, drinking the mad cocktails that Chris invented, chatting, reading, listening to music. They had the limitless sense of time that only young people can have. He could feel it, as if he were actually back there, in the skin of the person he had been. The room around him faded, the sun flashed into his eyes. The weather was fantastically hot, high summer heat, the kind you only get in distorted memories. The water was the North Sea – always too cold to swim in, unless you were really out of your head – but Lara was standing at the edge of the pebble beach in a white swimsuit, threatening to try it, shouting for Chris to dare her. Paul was on a deckchair, back near the house. He was just sitting there, watching her, completely fixated by the way she was standing, the way she held herself. It was the first time he had seen her in a swim-suit, the first time he had seen so much of her. He was transfixed. The complete lack of self-consciousness, the open, easy way she laughed. That morning they had walked along the beach and she had held both their hands, Chris and he, one each side of her. He could still feel her hand now, feel its tiny warmth against his fingers.

The stench jolted him out of the past. The image cut and his feet moved. He walked forwards like an automaton. Then stopped again, a few feet short of the body, his mind desperately searching the empty, aural space surrounding him. Had he heard something behind him? He turned and looked, moved the torch across the high, ornate ceilings, the crumbling stucco. Nothing. He stepped over to the corpse, legs trembling. He bent over and looked.

It wasn’t either of them. Not Chris, not Lara. It was a man – middle-aged, dark skin, lank hair, slightly fat. He was on his front, head twisted sideways, jaw open, loose, broken and hanging from the rest of the face, smashed teeth sticking out, eyes swollen shut, nose crushed flat.

Paul heard the breath rushing out of his own lungs. Relief. This wasn’t anyone he knew. He started to laugh about it, out loud. But then his stomach turned and he retched, the bile coming into his mouth before he could stop it. He swallowed hard. The battered head was resting in a thick pool of jellied blood, exposing the fatal injury. Behind the ear there was a wound so devastating there were shards of skull jutting through the clot-soaked hair.

Automatically, Paul stooped and touched the skin on the back of one of the hands. The warmth went through him like electricity. He recoiled. Only minutes ago this man had been alive, crawling, desperately trying to get away. Which meant Paul had walked into the middle of something, something that was still going on.

He caught his breath and looked frantically around him. They had to be here. Not here in this room, not here in this building. But somewhere near. Down there, by the sea, in the other place.

That meant he was here also. Pasha. He was already here. That was all it could mean. He had been here when Chris and Lara arrived. He had been waiting for them.

Paul stood and started to run, out through the echoing rooms, back to the open front door. As he came out into the diffuse light he started to shout for Macall.

2

Saturday, 22nd May, 2010

Seven days before. Paul was in London, where he’d been living since getting back from Pakistan in mid April. He was still trying to adjust to the odd mix of convenience and discomfort, still trying to convince himself he somehow belonged in this suffocating crush of commodities and people. He found himself missing things he had once hated – the desert, the heat, the interminable views to distant mountains. At the time the jagged peaks had seemed like a wall, hemming them in a killing zone full of unidentifiable threats.

That Saturday, like any other since he’d got back, had started early: out of bed and into a cold shower, just after five. The boiler was faulty – he’d complained already – and could just about manage to get the water hot by midday, but Paul couldn’t lie in bed that long. Force of habit. He needed coffee in his system and his eyes wide open by six.

He was living in a one room apartment in Bow, not much more than a bedsit, but it was way above the standard of accommodation he’d become used to – luxury compared to sleeping in the back of a Humvee in northern Pakistan, which was where he’d been just over a month before. The flat came as part of a job. After leaving the army he had passed a year doing private security ‘in theatre’ and then another six months in Pakistan, but this was his first job since coming home. The man he was working for was living in a new development about a mile away; a gated, guarded and more exclusive place. It was close enough for Paul to get there on foot, in under thirty minutes, which he was required to do on demand, in an emergency, and by ten o’clock each and every morning, seven days a week.

The building Paul was in was a converted townhouse and the remaining floors were taken by three eastern European families, each with a swarm of kids and an unceasing stream of new arrivals burdened with massive wheeled suitcases. They were connected to his employer in some way, since he owned the block, but Paul was trying to keep a blind eye to all that.

The job was a straightforward security job, organised through an agency that specialised in placing ex-soldiers, and it wasn’t any of Paul’s business to work out what his client did. Cheap foreign labour, drugs, prostitution, people trafficking? It didn’t really matter, provided he didn’t see any of it. All he had to do was drive the man around and watch his back. He’d been told he was there because of a ‘general criminal threat’. It wasn’t a professional level of information to work on, but then Paul didn’t regard this kind of work as professional. If they came at the car with guns, or in numbers, he’d be the first to leg it. A higher level of dedication would require a higher level of remuneration than one and a half grand a month and a shitty bedsit with a broken boiler.

Today, the change in tempo started with one of those vivid memory episodes that now periodically disrupted his waking hours. He was passing Bow Road tube, just after nine thirty-five, on his way to the client. He had the earphones in and the iPod working through a playlist of recent D’n’B material he’d put together online, without paying a penny. The track was something by Breakage, from a new album. He was wondering whether he wasn’t too old for this drumfunk thing— when the memory slotted right in there, out of nowhere. Then he couldn’t hear the music at all. His mind was a million miles away. Or several thousand. In a tent, a long way behind the notional front line, a laptop on his knees, programming the movements of an unmanned recon drone with a wireless controller not very unlike the sort of thing kids used on an Xbox. Except this wasn’t a game. He had just identified a set of structures and delivered coordinates. The drone had been on station all morning and the process had taken him forty-seven seconds. A record for him. The result – six minutes later – had been a one minute barrage from three howitzer batteries dug in over eight miles away. He couldn’t see them, but he had heard them clear enough. The morning had been full of that sound.

There were twenty-two casualties, thirteen killed instantly. In one minute. The most accurate piece of observation he had ever pulled off, and it was all done with an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar remote machine that was not much larger than the RC planes he had played with as a kid. At the time he had thought of it with satisfaction. Seven minutes forty-seven seconds from request to ordnance delivery. There had been lots of backslapping and handshaking. The drone was a relatively new resource for his spotter unit and it had worked. It had been less dangerous than crawling around in the dirt to get a line-of-sight fix.

Thirteen dead. The word, and the number, meant nothing said just like that – out loud, whilst standing in the middle of a London street, the sweat pouring off him, people looking at him as if he were mad. It meant nothing as he had looked down on it all afterwards from two thousand feet, through the drone’s powerful twin lenses. He had been able to see the bodies then, the ‘civilians’ running with them, the frantic struggles to get people out of the devastated structures.

But now he was here, two years later, trying to understand it. He had brought a set of cross hairs over a complex of buildings in some unknown village – just one little stage in a bigger battle plan. Someone in the field – an officer with a squad pinned in crossfire – had put in the request and he had responded. He had pressed a button to send information to an artillery system. Just grid references, computer images and automated tasks. Sitting in a tent full of sand and dirt and cabling, stripped to his faded beige T-shirt with other people constantly moving around him in the insufferable midday heat.

He had killed thirteen people.

Or was it the gunners? Or the officer who had radioed the request? He stared at the London street and tried to get some sense of reality into it. He watched the cars and people moving around him – the people for whom he had pressed that button – faces and shapes as undifferentiated as the rows of body bags they’d lined up afterwards.

At the time – throughout his time in theatre, in fact – he had thought nothing of this action. Nothing at all. There had been too many other moments crowding it out, some so closely fought and terrifying that he still had nightmares about them. Most of his second tour had been spent as an artillery spotter, and that had frequently meant operating from forward positions. Sometimes their plans had come unstuck. He was twenty-four and there was already a lifetime of horror burned into his brain. But this was the first time he had remembered a remote action like this. Suddenly, and inexplicably, he had to fight back an urge to cry. They had moved through the village later that day. That was when he had walked through the results of his little video game, when it had become a reality. Two of the body bags had been tiny. The size of children.

The break beat thudded on in his ears, the people in the street flooded around him. There were enough people converging on the tube entrance for his presence to be an irritation to them. He was a lump of static flesh, an obstruction. But not one anyone was going to shout at. He was far too big for that. Six foot five, and muscular. The cropped hair, the physique and the bearing made it an easy guess that he was either a squaddie or a bouncer – but the hair and the unusual size distracted from a face that had more sensitive features. The eyes were shy – an attractive, grey-green – the eyebrows fine. His nose had never been noticeably broken and his jaw didn’t jut aggressively. Instead he had a cautious, sideways manner of looking at things that betrayed a thoughtfulness it was easy to miss. It was the same when he spoke. The voice was predictably deep, but the delivery was careful and slow.

He’d never worked at his shape, never did anything deliberately to keep fit. The physique was a genetic ‘gift’. It was a mistake people had made all his life that they assumed he was stupid, that all he could do was fight and make trouble. And after all, he was Big Eddie Curtis’s son. Joining the army was exactly what was expected of him.

Not that the army was what his father had wanted. When alive his dad had done everything he could to keep him away from violence – including getting enough of a regular income to pull Paul out of the local gutter-comp he had himself attended as a kid. The alternative was expensive: a relatively new private day school – still very definitely local, but with a name for good exam results. Eddie Curtis thought he was setting his son up for life, but in Chorlton – the nondescript Manchester suburb where Paul had grown up – everyone knew the kinds of people Big Eddie worked for, knew where the money was coming from. And anyway, Big Eddie was dead before Paul’s fifteenth birthday, murdered. If Paul had been inclined to forget them, there was no more effective way to rub in his roots, to stamp them right through his character like a name in candy rock. When Paul looked back on his school days, mostly it felt like a failed experiment in social mobility. He hadn’t even got rid of the Manchester accent.

He brought a hand up to his eyes and rubbed them, then took deep breaths. And at that moment the second thing happened. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement by the kerb. He turned slightly to see a big black Merc SUV pull in right beside him. Even before it stopped the doors were opening and he had fight-or-flight screaming through every vein in his body. If this was six weeks ago he’d be on autopilot by now, ducking, going for his weapon. Or running. If cars came at you like this in Peshawar, or Pindi, it was either a kidnap or a hit. But this was London. He forced himself to recall that. He held his breath, turned towards the car and waited.

The man coming out the front passenger side was white, unarmed. Everything about his look and manner said police. Paul didn’t like the police, didn’t trust them. It had been that way all his life, another gift from his dad. Behind the first man was a bigger guy: darker skin, shades, bulky clothing, arms loose in the way you held them if you were going to pull something from under your jacket. Paul let his breath get back to normal, reached up and slipped the earphones out. The noise of London traffic came at him.

‘Paul Curtis?’ the first one asked, stepping towards him. Unmistakeably official voice. Paul nodded, looking down at him. Ordinary middle-aged face, smart suit. Nothing to worry about. Not physically, anyway.

‘We need you to come with us,’ the man said. ‘Just a short detour.’

Was something going down with his client, he wondered? A search, a raid, which meant they wanted him out of the way first? He considered asking, but it didn’t really matter. The client meant nothing to him. By contrast, the man standing below him was showing him official ID. Paul nodded, without scrutinising it. Back at the Merc the other was standing watching, hands at his sides.

‘OK,’ Paul said. He . . .