Hunting the Priest Killer - Day 9

Trying to find a co-operative gang peon is like trying to find a vegetarian in a steak house. Harry and I spent nearly seven hours trying to find out what had happened to Fred when he passed into gang territory without finding a single canary to sing for us.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that after seven hours both Harry and I were tired and a tiny bit grumpy…and when I say a tiny bit grumpy, I mean I may have shot out the tyres of a car because it drove through a puddle and splashed me.

We had attracted far too much attention without gaining any information. I would say that things were getting dangerous, but then again we were going after a gang leader with brute force – was never going to be a day playing in a strawberry patch.

What made it more dangerous was the rain. When it rains, it pours and people don’t take to the streets – not unless those people are looking for someone or something. So Harry and I needed to get out of the rain and whilst we waited for it to pass we could think of a way to find out where Fred was.

There were several abandoned properties of both home and warehouse; we decided home was less likely to be occupied by illegal business.

We were wrong.

Harry and I forced the backdoor of the first empty house we saw and walked straight into an interrogation. Fred was tied to a chair in the middle of the kitchen looking as if Mike Tyson, Frank Bruno and Mohammad Ali had all taken it in turns to practise on him.

On the plus side we had managed to find Fred by blind luck. On the downside we were now face-to-face with gang members that actually had more of an ideal of who we were and what they were doing with the guns they were aiming at our foreheads…at close range.

Bluffing seemed like the only way that any of us would make it out of the room alive, but neither Harry nor I had ever been any good at bluffing. So we surrendered, threw down our guns and got knocked out for it.

The next thing I remember is seeing Sykes’ ugly face peering at mine. A piece of advice – even if someone is tied to a chair and has been unconscious for an undisclosed length of time, don’t put your face too close to their’s or you are liable to find yourself suffering from a Glaswegian kiss.

Sykes learnt that the hard way.

Lots of threats and swearing followed, but ultimately the bleeding where I broke his nose stopped and he calmed down long enough to admit that it had been him that had killed Patrick.

I’m not sure how I thought I’d feel when he admitted to that, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I had hoped. I think I would have felt vindicated, right, and then be able to shoot him between the eyes. This clearly didn’t happen. If anything I felt angrier than any of the times that Harry and Fred have been kidnapped or hurt.

I don’t really remember what happened next, but Harry swears from where he was sitting I did a complete Bruce Banner.

But then again, Harry is prone to exaggerate.