Ruthless - [18]

‘Yeah? But that’s beside the point, isn’t it. Because you were in charge. The buck stops with you, Rufus. The foreman always takes responsibility for any balls-ups.’

‘What do you want me to say, Don?’ asked Rufus, feeling exhausted, in pain, defeated. He’d been putting this off so long, and now here it was, here it came for him. He wasn’t going to walk out of this room, he knew it. ‘God knows I didn’t want it to happen. But it did.’

‘What I want you to say is that you’re sorry, Rufus. That’s what.’

‘I am sorry. Jesus, he was only a kid. He should never have been there, Don, he wasn’t up to it. I got shot, Pardew shot me. But I got him. I went to church when I was well enough, after it happened, lit a penny candle for Pikey’s – Peter’s – soul.’

‘And I’ll light one for you,’ said Don, and nodded to the man on his left.

He was holding a petrol can.

Ah Jesus…

He took off the cap, and emptied the contents over Rufus’s head. Rufus spluttered and coughed, the fumes engulfing him, suffocating him. He swallowed petrol. Spat it out, choking, gagging.

‘Shit,’ he shouted. ‘Don, come on. You can’t…’

‘I can.’ Don was taking a box of matches from his pocket. His eyes were hard, implacable. He was really going to do this. He took out a match, paused, and grinned at Rufus before moving to strike it.

That pause, that almost imperceptible second’s worth of gloating time, was a mistake.

Rufus lashed out hard with his foot, catching Don in the groin. Don let out a wheezing groan, dropped the unlit match and doubled over, his face screwed up, falling to his knees in a moment of almost exquisite agony.

The heavy on the left moved in and Rufus kicked out again, aiming for the man’s knee. He heard the thing pop out of its socket with a satisfactory snap, and the man fell to the floor, stumbling over his boss’s huddled form.

Now the one on the right.

But this one was more cautious. This was the one who’d coshed him, Rufus reckoned. This one had the eyes of a thinker, he was not just a mound of dumb muscle. Rufus was on his feet now, crouching, still pinioned by the chair, tied to it, unable to straighten up. He turned sharply, hoping to hit the man with the chair, but it was only a glancing blow. The man reacted too quickly, bouncing back on his toes, just out of reach.

When Rufus looked over his shoulder a cosh had appeared in the man’s right hand and he was swinging it viciously. The other two men were still writhing helplessly on the floor in a sea of stinking fuel. Rufus edged away from the cosh until the chair hit the sink and he couldn’t go any further. If his arms hadn’t been tied, he could have sorted this fucker with his fists. Improvising fast, he jammed the chair legs over the rim of the sink and used the leverage to lift both legs, pistoning them out with all the strength he could muster.

He caught the man in the stomach.

The man doubled over, dropping the cosh, retching and trying to draw breath as he clutched at his belly.

Rufus unjammed the chair from the sink rim and kicked the man in the head, hard, while he was down. Then he propelled himself towards the window, launching himself at it head-first, chair and all.

He shot through the tattered drapes. Felt the impact as his head went through the glass, the rotten frame disintegrating under his weight. He hit the ground hard, with bits of broken window raining down all around him in the dry dirt. And still the fecking chair had him in its grip, though a couple of the legs had broken off in the fall. He looked wildly around him, blood dripping in his eyes so that he could barely see, knowing that he had to get clear before Big Don and his men recovered their wits.

Scrambling to his feet, bent double with his arms still strapped to the chair, he ran as best he could.

He could see the hotel through the trees, about five hundred yards away. They hadn’t even bothered to take him far, confident that they had him, that they would incinerate him in the old building in the woods and make their escape before anyone realized what had happened.

Expecting them to overtake him any minute, Rufus hobbled towards the driveway, hunched double under the chair’s weight, bleeding, sweating, and reeking of petrol. When he made it to the entrance he toppled through the door with a crash, causing the thin receptionist to leap to his feet, hands raised in alarm, face contorted in disgust at this bloody apparition messing up his nice clean hotel. He shot out from behind his desk to stop Rufus coming any further.

‘Merde!’ cried the man, gawping at the blood dripping from Rufus on to the marble floor.

‘Yeah, you got that right,’ said Rufus. ‘Now will you for feck’s sake get these ropes cut before the people who tied me to this damned chair catch up with me?’

Something in Rufus’s expression convinced the receptionist that he’d best do as he was told. He found a pair of scissors and with trembling hands cut the ropes. To his obvious relief, Rufus was not inclined to stick around. The moment he was free, he ran out of the hotel and leapt into the Rolls-Royce. Picturing the diplomat’s outrage at this disruption to his schedule, Rufus sped off down the drive. He didn’t stop until he reached the border, where he abandoned the car and crossed on foot into Spain.