Page 56 of Fury

I’d turned over five or six times, not finding comfort on any side or at any angle. My mind was plagued with him. His body, the dragon tattoo, his cock, the woman in the bar, the mysterious phone call that made him go running off. None of it should matter. I shouldn’t care about any of it. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to take those thoughts away, to fill my head with blackness, to steal my consciousness. But every time I got just to the edge of sleep, I jolted, the release escaping me.

I let my mind wander back to the funeral. To watching the emotionless faces of the bikers. Of Fury’s face that wasn’t emotionless. He’d been the opposite, filled to the brim with it but not letting one drop of it go. The older woman had hung on to him tightly, with familiarity. And the man he called Indie. He’d looked lost and troubled all at once. Carrying the world and more on his shoulders. Despair and exhaustion. I could see all of it in those big, strong, leather clad men.

And then I was over the bike again. Feeling his cock inside me, filling me, grinding inside and I pushed my legs together, squeezing my eyes shut, trying not to think of the heat building, the intense heavy feeling deep inside my pussy. Gordon. New businesses. ‘Gordon came to talk to me about it a few months ago’.

My eyes shot open, and I bolted upright. Gordon. The missing money. Shit.

Jumping out of bed, I ran to the bathroom, turning the shower on, not waiting for it to heat. I winced as I stepped under the cold stream of water, flinching as it hit my nipples, a shiver racing down my spine from the icy blast. And then I was pulling on some jeans, tugging my mussed up, just fucked hair into some excuse of a messy bun, staring at myself in the mirror for a few seconds whilst I considered whether anyone would notice.

The hotel foyer was quiet. A lonely receptionist sitting at the front desk, probably wishing away the hours till they could finish the graveyard shift and go to bed. The man looked up at me quizzically.

“Can you get me a taxi?” I asked, glancing at the clock above his head. Four fucking o’clock in the morning. “And a coffee. Can you order me a coffee?”

I probably could have done with a shot of something in it to take the pain of the early hour away.

*****

The taxi dropped me off at the other office on the far side of Newcastle. I’d been through the Byker office with a thin-tooth comb, so if there was evidence of what Gordon was up to, it would be here, not Byker. The place was dark, locked up and untouched by Fury’s cameras yet. Which meant there was a risk. But so far, no one knew what I did about Gordon.

It took me a while to find the right keys from the bundle that weighed my handbag down and jingled loudly in the sleepy street. A street of grand Victorian terraces on one side and big gated detached properties on the other. Even the cars told a story, barely any older than three years old.

My father had set this office up right in the middle of one of the most affluent areas of Newcastle, waiting for the older population to die and fill the little office with business. It was a bigger, grander office, matching the properties in the street it was nestled within. The decoration was modern, the paint on the walls bright white on smooth plaster, not yellowing woodchip, which had about an inch of gloss over the top. The carpets were thick under my flesh-coloured pumps I’d dug out of the bottom of my suitcase not even an hour ago, the balls of my feet too tired to cope with another pair of high heels after a night of no sleep.

Lights flicked on as I walked down the hall towards the offices at the back, automatically lighting the way as the sensors caught each movement. There were two offices, basically furnished but functional, and with the same rows of filing cabinets along the walls, like the Byker one. My father and brothers didn’t seem to believe in fucking technology. Each desk in each room had a computer that took up nearly a third of the space, and I suspected if I tried to connect to the internet from them, I would hear the tinny dial up tone from the late nineties.

The filing cabinets were locked. Shut tight and none of the keys on my keyring fit. I scraped around drawers, finding nothing, not even a paperclip that might have persuaded the barrel in the little lock to turn. So, after rushing across the city, an idea hatching in my brain, I was stuck in the dark early hours of the morning with an entire load of bodies to keep me company. Curling up in the office chair, my eyes felt heavy, falling like shutters. I could just sleep till the staff appeared, hoping someone had a key. I could catch a few hours until daylight streamed through the blinds. Sleep. I needed some sleep.

The office was cold. I pulled my wool overcoat up to my neck, drawing my legs up onto the office chair. I should have stayed in my bed, rather than leaping out and rushing to this office to be thwarted by locked fucking filing cabinets. I stared into the dark, the office lights switching off as I sat so still. Waving an arm to catch the motion sensor, the office chair moved underneath me, sending me wobbling and smacking my knee off the little set of drawers under the desk. Something chinked lightly at my feet.

“Shit,” I cursed, rubbing my shin, and trying not to kick the inanimate object in temper.

My ears strained suddenly, a memory jumping into my head. The little chink of metal. I dropped to the floor, to my hands and knees, feeling around the stand of the office chair, to where I remember the sound having come from. My fingers touched it. The cold feel of metal. Keys. Small keys. Holding them to the light, I studied them, keys small enough to fit the filing cabinets. Shit.

I raced to the wall where they stood, the cluster of keys jingling on the ring. Four cabinets, five drawers each. It would take me ages to search them all. Hours maybe. But it was all I had. I’d found no trace of the missing money. Got no sense of where it was going. I could only see cheques cashed or money taken out of the bank accounts. There was no trace and sign of this elusive cheque book.

The drawer rumbled loudly; the runners bouncing over an uneven surface, catching on files stuffed full in the drawer underneath. It was just like the Byker office. Files and files on dead clients and written invoices. I pulled one out, flicking through the paperwork, recognising my father’s handwriting. And then, as I got through another drawer the handwriting changed, Gordon’s signatures scrawled on the bottom, a similar hand to my father’s but not as pretty, the ‘s’ and ‘p’ letters not as round, the tails at the end of the letters not as flourished. But it was so closely similar that it would be barely noticeable.

Behind me, morning sun seeped through the cracks in the vertical blinds, the office growing lighter and lighter. There was little time before the office filled with staff, with Gordon himself, and still I had found nothing. The drawers were too full. I’d only made it through the first cabinet. I glanced at the keys in my hand. They were all the same shape, all but one. Six keys, five filing cabinets. There was something else here. Something else locked.

Moving back to the desk, I pulled at the little set of drawers on the right-hand side, pulling each one out and sifting through the post-it notes, the highlighters, the mass of pens. A staple pierced my index finger painfully, drawing a prick of blood, and I swore, dropping the set of keys onto the floor under the desk. They bounced away underneath, and I dropped to my hands and knees, crawling forward. Sunlight streaked in through the window behind me now, casting little beams of light across the room, scattering golden rays across the floor, and shining off two objects under the desk. A hook. Where I must have knocked the keys from, hidden from view, concealed. And then behind the set of drawers that was fixed into the table was something else. Another block of something dark, the sunlight catching off a metal lock. I closed my hands around it, the mass cold on my fingers. A metal box hidden and secured under the table. A safe.

Fumbling for the sixth key, I slotted it inside, the lock clicking encouragingly and the door springing open. It wasn’t the biggest of safes and I didn’t know what I expected to find there. There were a handful of envelopes pushed inside. I pulled them out, studying the words written on the front. Calcutt, Thomas, De Vere, Hegarty, Smith. Surnames. There were surnames on the front. Folding my legs under me, I sat on the floor, pulling the first one out. It was a contract between Arthur Calcutt and Fischer Funeral Plans Ltd. I scanned the text. It looked good enough. The man would pay a monthly sum, and it would go into a funeral pot and his family would never have to pay a penny on his death. Arthur Calcutt signed it. But behind the contract sat another document. Last Will and Testament, it read. Perhaps instructions for his funeral.

My eyes flicked over the page, at the mention of his estate, and how he was leaving a third of his estate to Gordon Fischer, and the rest to the church. It was signed with the same signature as the funeral plan contract.

I opened the next envelope. Malcolm Thomas. And Malcolm Thomas was doing exactly the same, leaving ten percent of his estate to Gordon and the rest to the church. Every envelope was the same. Shit. This whole new business was more than just a funeral plan scam, this was fraud on a much higher scale.

Outside the office, the floor creaked, the old floorboards sending a signal. I started, straightening suddenly, slamming the top of my head against the underside of the desk, and swallowing the stream of swear words that threatened to tumble out in vitriol vomit. Tidying the pile of envelopes, I pushed them back inside the safe, locking the door, the door on the other side of the office scratching as the old swollen wood caught in the frame. I pulled myself from the floor, shooting up from behind the desk, Gordon’s keen hazel eyes pinning me in place.

“What are you doing, Heidi?” He asked, his tone as cold as the breeze he scattered into the office.

“My shoe,” I answered, holding up the cream-coloured pump, “it fell off.”

“What are you doing in my office?”

I teetered on one leg, pulling the shoe back onto my foot. “Working. Couldn’t sleep. We need to get all this paper stuff onto an electronic database.” I waved my hand at the cabinets.

Gordon frowned, and I slowly swallowed.