A Heart in the Right Place Page 15

  She regarded her jacket and sighed. “Do you know how much this Muubaa cost me?”

  “Moo baa?” frowned Tony.

  “The jacket,” said Nick. “It’s designer gear. And it looks really good on you too, miss,” he added loudly.

  “Ruined,” she said.

  “And goes well with those boots. Jimmy Choo?”

  “Moncler.”

  “Of course.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” asked Tony.

  “It does no harm to show an interest in quality designer clothing, dad.”

  The woman unzipped a pocket, trying to avoid the sticky stuff, and pulled out a Polaroid camera. The case was seriously cracked. The woman juggled it in her good hand and came in close to take a photo of Nick. He gave her his best smile although he wasn’t sure why. The flash made shapes pinwheel across his vision.

  “Name?” she demanded.

  “What?” said Nick.

  “It’s Nick,” said Tony.

  She wrote on Nick’s picture with a marker pen. “So this is the boy who has an idealised view of the world? The one who organised this special weekend for you?”

  Nick frowned and looked at his dad. “What have you been telling her?”

  “Plenty,” said the woman. “He knows that this weekend is a half-arsed attempt to patch up – what? – thirty-odd years of a poor to non-existent father-son relationship.”

  “That’s not true!” said Tony.

  “Too right,” said Nick. “There was nothing half-arsed about my plans for this weekend.”

  “Over-arsed if anything,” said Tony.

  “At least I’m trying,” snapped Nick.

  “You are that, my son.”

  The woman smiled. “Anyway, I’m Finn, your executioner. You should probably be grateful to me,” she said to Tony. “I’m saving you from a tedious weekend with your useless offspring here and, better still, I am going to kill you quickly. Which has got to be better than waiting for the cancer to take you in slow and painful increments. You know what—” she said with sudden enthusiasm, “—we could give you a little eco funeral out here. You’d like, wouldn’t you, Tony?”

  “He doesn’t know what he wants,” said Nick. “He’s never willing to discuss his funeral.”

  Tony sniffed. “Why should it bother me? I’m going to be dead, son. You can do what you like with me – I won’t know and won’t care – just roll me into a hole and bury me.”

  “There you go,” said Finn. “Deal.”

  “Can I just point out we don’t need to die at all,” said Nick. He cleared his throat and looked at his dad. “I meant, like, not now. I haven’t forgotten you’re … I was just saying—” He turned to Finn. “You can deliver Oz and his heart to your boss and let us go. There’s been a simple case of mistaken identity.”

  Finn wandered over to the body. “You know these people believe in werewolves?”

  “Who?” said Tony.

  “The people who want his heart.”

  “And are they mad?”

  Finn shrugged.

  Nick was confused. “You mean werewolf as in werewolf? Not…?”

  “Not what?” said Tony.

  “Not like … into animal spirits and wearing T-shirts with wolves on and listening to too much Celtic folk music.”

  “Hippies,” said Tony.

  “Gangsters,” said Finn.

  “We’re talking about actual werewolves?” said Tony.

  Finn took a damp and crumpled sheet out of her pocket. It was slimed with blood, blue chemicals, and now creosote. “The reason they want this guy’s heart is because eating it is supposed to make you a werewolf. According to Ma Bingley’s instructions.”

  “Can I just check,” said Nick, “none of this has anything to do with the marketing campaign for Kirkwood sausages?”

  “No.” She looked at him like he was an idiot (which was rather unfair since she was the one talking about werewolves.) “Did you think this was about sausages?”

  “No,” said Nick, “but it’s nice to have it confirmed.”

  “You know werewolves don’t exist, don’t you?” asked Tony.

  Finn shrugged. “That’s what I thought, but the people who are paying me believe they exist, and that’s the main thing.” She looked into the dead man’s chest cavity and pulled out a few bits of remaining material, including a jigsaw blade, a drill bit and a small but expensive-looking knife, more ornamental than a tool.

  Finn weighed the knife in her hand. “Silver. Seems Oz believed it too. I guess he believed it enough to lock himself in a cage, last place he lived.”

  “The silver homeopathy tablets,” murmured Tony.

  Nick was thinking about the extra dog basket back at Oz’s mom’s place. The bars on the windows. It was the sort of practical detail you’d need in your life if you believed in werewolves. If you believed you were a werewolf and needed locking in once in every blue Moon. Not blue Moon, he told himself; full Moon. He idly wondered how large a demographic werewolves represented. It would be a terrible thing to die on the cusp of discovering an untapped market. It would be a terrible thing to die anyway.

  Finn leaned over the body and took a Polaroid picture. In the camera flash, the body seemed to twitch. Nick suspected it was a trick of the light. Or he suspected it wasn’t a trick of the light, and hoped it was.

  “That silver knife,” he said.

  Finn looked at him, picked up the blade and effortlessly balanced it on the end of her finger. “Yes?”

  “Did you perhaps take it from his heart?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Nick made a faint, lightly panicked noise. “You see, as a marketing guy, I know all about the customer’s journey. I know narratives.”

  “Are we going back to the sausage thing?” muttered Tony.

  “No, it’s more about me knowing what should happen in certain situations. The narrative flow.”

  “Tony, if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to kill your son first,” said Finn.

  “And if there’s a werewolf – if there’s a werewolf – with a silver blade in its heart, and someone takes it out…”

  “For the last time,” said Tony, “there’s no such thing as—”

  There was a loud growling noise from the thing on the counter.

  “Fuck!” said Finn.

  “Language!” said Tony. “It’s just the body settling, expelling gases and— Fuck!”

  On the counter, Oz sat up.

  “Put it back! The knife! Put it back!” squealed Nick.

  Oz’s eyes opened. Yellow animal eyes turned on Nick.

  “Or not,” whimpered Nick.

  Something was happening to the gaping holes gouged into Oz’s chest. They were sealing up. Tissue fibres re-weaved themselves together. It was like watching a time lapse video of an autopsy in reverse. Blood flaked away. Loops of intestine and blobs of organs slipped back into position and waited for the skin and tissue pixies to come by and make good the surface layer.

  “Hair!” yelled Tony, transfixed.

  He wasn’t wrong. There was suddenly more hair. A lot more.

  A hideous change rippled across Oz. Limbs noisily elongated, flinging his shoes away and making dog pads of his toes. He opened his mouth and ran a tongue across his new, terrifying fangs.

  “Wolf!” yelled Tony.

  “Fucking werewolf,” breathed Nick.

  Oz’s throat vibrated with a beastly growl. He slipped onto the floor, two feet taller than he had been as a man. While much of Nick’s mind was flailing around in madness and terror, an unnecessarily analytic part of it was trying to comprehend what he was seeing. It had a wolf’s head but not precisely a wolf’s head. It had an elongated snout and the ears had shifted round and up and the teeth… Oh, God, the teeth. That jaw was massive. It looked like it could swallow Nick whole. He was prey and it was a predator – the predator – and those off-white fangs… Nick knew, just knew, those teeth would soon be coming for him, tea
ring into his flesh.

  The Oz-wolf roared at them all. Nick couldn’t be sure, but Oz had to be raging against the undignified manhandling his corpse had received. If he had super powers as a werewolf, that would surely include an enhanced sense of smell. It wouldn’t take him long before he tracked the shitty smears on his shirt to Nick, who was working hard not to fill his pants again. He knew he was in big trouble. They were all in big trouble, but Oz had particular reason to be angry at Nick.

  Pickles ran in through the open door. Nick had hoped the dog was somewhere far away from harm. He’d even entertained a brief hope she might turn out to be a wonder dog who would run across the countryside and get help from strangers. No, she had come back and was likely to get killed alongside the rest of them. Pickles yapped up at Oz in excitement. Did she recognise her former master, or did she just see a massive dog standing on its hind legs?

  The Oz-wolf was distracted for a moment. Finn took the opportunity to lunge at it with the blade so recently removed from its heart. She grazed its chest, but the knife didn’t find its target. Oz spun out of the blade’s path and came back at her with a claw-fisted punch which knocked the knife from her hand and sent her flying against another counter.

  Pickles barked and danced around. Something exciting was clearly going on but Pickles couldn’t work out what, so she did the dog thing of jumping about and making noise. A small group of boars had entered the building too. Whether they were drawn by the noise or the smells was uncertain. Whatever, they were entirely unfazed by the werewolf and several seemed much more interested in the food pellets glued all over Finn’s body.

  The Oz-wolf, surrounded by an excited dog, milling boars and three mostly prone humans, roared his dominance. In that instant, Nick realised he had been totally cured of his fear of boars. All it took was the appearance of a fucking werewolf to terrify him so thoroughly there was no room for fear of anything else.

  Finn rolled, punched a nosy boar on the snout and got to her feet.

  “They weren’t lying then,” she said. She dug inside her jacket and pulled out a sheathed knife. With a wrist flick she cast off the sheath to reveal a long, surgery-sharp knife.

  The Oz-wolf clearly recognised the blade for what it was, and growled angrily.

  “Knife,” whispered Tony.

  “I can see it’s a knife,” Nick whispered back.

  “No. Knife!” He pointed with his bound hands at the one Finn had dropped.

  Nick was closest to it. He tried an experimental roll sideways.

  “Who do you think they had picked out as your successor?” Finn said to the beast. “Think it might be me?”

  The Oz-wolf had no witty comebacks apart from snarls. Finn beckoned it closer, trowel and knife ready for it.

  Nick writhed across the floor towards the dropped blade, well aware he was not being subtle. A boar leg appeared by his face and he bit it without a second thought. The boar moved, but another replaced in moments later. Nick registered Oz leaping down on top of Finn but pressed forward in his mission to get the knife. The growling, grunting and barking reached a crescendo as Oz raked powerful claws across Finn’s chest.

  She screamed, crashing down on the floor between Nick and the knife. She snorted in pain, spraying bubbles of blood from her crushed nose. For a man with less mobility than a slug, Nick managed to spring back out of the way very quickly. He glanced back at Tony. Somehow his father had his wrists free and was making his way over to help.

  Tony held up a piece of jagged plastic. “I think she broke her camera.”

  As Tony sawed through the cable tie holding Nick’s wrists, the Oz-wolf dragged Finn upright. She pummelled the beast with a one-two: knife then trowel. The werewolf recoiled for a moment only, lunging forward and clamping its jaws over the woman’s arm.

  “That jacket will definitely be ruined now,” Nick heard someone say. He realised it was him.

  “This way,” said Tony. Nick let himself be pulled backward, feet still bound together. Nick snatched at precious items as he was pulled through a door. They were in the walk-in freezer, a windowless cubicle of a room. Tony grabbed a metal hook off an overhead bar and jammed it into the latch mechanism. “That should hold it.”

  Outside, Finn bellowed. Nick was very much a live and let live kind of guy. He liked to think one of the reasons he worked in marketing and advertising was because he was always ready to see things from the other person’s perspective. People, on all sides of any conflict, had their own personal motivations, and no one viewpoint was anymore valid than another. People were just people. No one was good or bad; it was all just different flavours of humanity. That said, if someone was going to be ripped apart by a vicious seven foot werewolf, he couldn’t think of anyone more deserving than the trowel-handed and creosote-dipped killer, Finn.

  He let out a ragged sigh. Just for a moment he could fool himself they were safe. He might have a little cry in a bit though. He could feel it coming on.

  “How are you holding up, son?” asked Tony.

  Nick let out another long sigh. Turns out he had a lot of sigh in him. “All things considered... You?”

  “Yeah fine. Apart from the fact we’re trapped in here while a hired killer and a werewolf slug it out before they kill us.”

  “Yeah. Things got a bit weird, didn’t they?” said Nick.

  “I don’t think a bit weird quite covers it.”

  Nick laughed, which was better than crying. He shuffled around and found a box to sit on. “How did a simple trip to Scotland get so messed up?”

  “Do you really want to analyse that now?” said Tony and knelt to saw through the cable ties around Nick’s ankles.

  “So this is my fault, is it?” said Nick. Just because he was almost certainly going to die didn’t stop him being instantly defensive.

  “I don’t know anyone else who would have made some of the choices you’ve made,” said Tony.

  “Oh, you really do think it’s my fault!”

  “It’s not a straightforward right or wrong thing. You come up with choices that nobody else would even dream of. What have you even got there?”

  Nick looked at the precious items he had grabbed before hiding in the walk-in freezer. He had the first aid box, the tyre foam kit and the bottle of Talisker whisky.

  “I had to think on my feet,” said Nick.

  “Any kind of thinking would have been good,” said Tony.

  “You just don’t appreciate that I think outside the box a bit.”

  “And where has thinking outside the box got us. Maybe the box is there for a reason, did you ever think of that?”

  Nick tried to respond, but wasn’t sure how. Somehow the box analogy had got out of hand. He put his hands on the door. It was cold but not sub-zero; the freezer wasn’t turned on. He pressed his ear to the door to listen.

  “Hear anything?” said Tony.

  “I think they’re done,” said Nick. “Or they’ve moved on.” He listened longer. There was no point rushing back into the fray. “You know, there’s a reason I am how I am. A dreamer. I can’t do the things you do.”

  “What things?” said Tony.

  “Stuff. Repair a toilet cistern. Put up shelves. Talk to blokes in pubs. I can’t do the things you do, or think about things the way you do. You never showed me how.”

  “What?” Tony made a noise halfway between amusement and outrage. “Are you saying I was a bad father?”

  “I was just—”

  “No, this is great timing, son. Take your dying father on a weekend away and…” The words died apoplectically in his throat. “You know, I always made sure you had everything you needed.”

  “I’m not saying you were a bad father.”

  “Really? That’s not what I heard.”

  “It’s just, you were never around. You worked hard, I know that,” he added quickly. “Maybe you worked a bit too hard. I wouldn’t have minded not having stuff, sometimes, if, you’d … you know?”

  “No. W
hat?”

  “If you could have been round more. We could have done stuff.”

  Tony made an exasperated noise and stalked away as far as the walk-in freezer would allow; which was wasn’t far enough so Tony did some angry little laps.

  “What stuff?” he demanded eventually.

  “What stuff?” said Nick.

  “Yes. What stuff? What was it you wanted to do so desperately that I was too cold and distant to do with you?”

  “I didn’t call you cold and distant.” Nick shook his head and thought. “Nothing specific.”

  “So, I wasn’t a good enough dad because I didn’t give you my time, but you can’t say what it is I should have taught you in that time.”

  “Nothing specific,” repeated Nick. “Not actual lessons, just like being a team.”

  “A team? Well if we’re going to get out of this we’re going to have to be a team,” said Tony.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Nick, happy to latch onto something practical rather than persist with the amateur soul-searching and vague recriminations. “What do we need to do?”

  “First of all we need to take stock,” said Tony. “What’s our situation? What do we have?”

  Nick looked at his meagre haul: first aid kit, foam tyre kit, and whisky bottle. “I think you’ve already poo-pooed my items. I’ve got my phone.” He took it out. “No signal and almost no battery. What about you?”

  Tony dug in his pockets. He produced his house keys, Oz’s argentum nitricum tablets, a little Nokia brick phone and his tobacco tin.

  “What’s in the tin?” said Nick. It was sure to be something amazing. Something to get them out of this mess.

  “Nothing useful,” said Tony. “What’s here in the freezer?” He explored the shelves and tested the hooks and chains on the hanging rail.

  Nick looked at the tyre foam kit. He’d been given it following his last engine service but never read the instructions. He roughly understood the principle. It was basically an aerosol canister full of expanding foam which, if squirted into a punctured tyre, would inflate it and harden enough to make the tyre drivable until the next garage. Nick had taken it as freebie without any intention of using it. There seemed little point in faffing about with foam and tyres when he had full cover from the AA.