The Barn

LUCY STAGGERS FROM THE BARN and stumbles into the Yorkshire night. As she fights to keep her footing in the mire, she looks around: the sky is cold and black and studded with a million stars, their dying light outlining the dales that surround her like a group of immense obelisks. Looming over her. Over the barn.

And, the man in the barn. Whose phone is in Lucy’s hand.

Who has hold of Lucy’s own phone.

On she stumbles. Her brain and vision and thoughts have been rattled, shaken, and scrambled by events inside the barn, but she has to concentrate, filter out the starlight and seek out the twin headlights of Superintendent Phil Decker’s prized MG, which should wending through the Dales towards her. Lucy blinks. Although it’s expected, it seems miraculous: she sees the lights, and hears the rasp of the MG as it zips her way.

Double-Decker is coming. But their plan of meeting at the barn is shot through; Lucy needs to get to the main road and intercept the MG as soon as she can.

Things have changed.

Lucy picks up her pace, but in doing so she staggers away from the barely-defined track that forks from the farmland’s main road; has to run through a field riddled with mud clods, feeling them squelch around her feet. She is only thirty yards or so from the main track, even closer to Decker, further from the horrible man inside the barn. She scans the bowl of dales around her. They continue to silently loom. Then she sees the stonewall that runs alongside the main road . . . it seems as far away as the dead stars that twinkle at her from way across the universe.

She wills herself on, as cold mud seeps through her trainers and ingresses her socks. She latches onto humour: she had been planning to do a few hikes in this part of the country ever since she was posted to West Yorkshire Police.

God’s own country, apparently, so several Yorkshire natives have informed her; though only God knows where in the case of these endless acres of barren, horrible farmland that has, in Lucy’s reconnaissance over the past few weeks, displayed no current evidence of farming.

She ploughs on, grunts with determination. Then screams as a boot lodges in the mire. Her mind instructs her to stop. Adrenalin tells her to continue. The mud takes over, makes the decision for her; holds her boot in its vacuum. Her ankle gives out, cracks violently as she falls face first into the mud. She tries to crawl on, only getting a few feet before the white-hot pain searing through her ankle overpowers her.

She tries to stand on her one good foot, but only face-plants herself into the mud and shit.

Everything here – the barn, the fields surrounding it- stunk like every animal that had ever grazed here had died in the summertime, and nature was still processing its decay. Death penetrated her nostrils.

A wind blows in across the valley floor. Lucy looks up the winding road. Decker is closer, but still some minutes away.

From the barn comes a groan.

*

That morning, Decker had wrinkled his nose on noticing a crease in his shirt as he buttoned it. Lucy had tried to pull him back to bed, which had him growling about the danger of further creases. Lucy apologised, watched his charm rekindle. Decker asked her one more time if she could do the task.

Lucy said yes. Decker kissed her, told her he would pick her up from the retail park at 3.

*

Florin Panescu, the man of the groan, was a highly dangerous man, Decker had reminded Lucy, good and often. Panescu was both fat and muscled, with amused eyes and a perma-stain of incoming stubble shading his jowls. His image had become a frequent star during the daily briefing in Decker’s little task force. Every day, the team learned, Panescu made the six-hour round trip, alone, between London and the Dales in an unremarkable Jeep. Dropped off varying amounts of celeb-grade coke, and less classy heroin.

“Six hours, Lucy,” Decker had barked, focusing his sharp, serious eyes on Lucy when she asked why Panescu was working solo, making micro-drops daily rather than in weekly bulk. “That’s bugger all to some of these runners. His kind, they drive across Europe like it’s a jolly over to Filey, so trundling up and down the A1 through Lincolnfuckingshire won’t worry them. And he’s a greedy bastard, so he does most of his own donkey work. Saves on pay. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got a shitload of scum for hire available at the end of the phone.”

Decker considered this. “In a way, I admire the bastard’s work ethic.”

After the brief, while their colleagues broke away, Decker had taken Lucy aside and apologised for the gruffness of his manner. He was under a lot of pressure, at work. A new London gang were trying to spread out to the northern powerhouse, take down Panescu, take over his turf. Somehow, he was expected to bring both gangs down. And at home, Decker had a foe he joked was every bit as evil and manipulative as Panescu.

His wife.

*

“The London people,” Decker had told her, a month into their affair. They were in her bed. “I made an agreement.”

“Jesus, Phil . . . “

Decker glared. Carried on with his confession. It’d been a while coming; he’d been doing his best to look like a man being weighed down with the evils of the world upon him, both spousal and criminal. “Make it look like a hit from the Chinese. We give them the drugs, they take over the route. I keep attention diverted from them.”

“But that’s all they do, Lucy. The London people. They only traffick coke. Drugs for rich bastards. None of that other stuff.”

“Only!” Lucy had gasped. “My heroes.”

Decker had looked at her sternly. “Panescu’s gang, they traffick people, Lucy. You know that. Women. Children. For sex work, Lucy.”

A beat. Lucy considered this, what she had seen, the images of missing girls.

“The London people, they don’t do that. Won’t ever.”

“So very altruistic,” Lucy had replied.

“The greater good, Lucy, is Panescu gone. He presents like a one-man band but there are plenty beneath him. The Chinese are as bad. Worse. We pull this off, and the Met will intensify on the Chinese. Good PR to take them down, too”

“What’s this “we” talk, Double?”

Phil rolled his eyes. Double Decker wasn’t a pet name he liked, but for the moment, Lucy’s upper hand held sway. The moment elapsed, Decker continued, “Imagine a world, where there’s no Panescu taking women and kids.

Lucy held her face in mock incredulity. “You mean there’s a world outside of my flat and the odd night in Manchester . . .”

Decker nodded, impatient. Said, “Aye. Lucy, there’s a world where we can be together. Properly together. I retire in two years, and the pension’s shit. As things stand, I divorce her and she’ll take me to the cleaners.

“What are they giving you, Phil? How much?”

“Lucy, it’s not just the money, it’s much more than that . . .”

“How. Much?”

“Two hundred. K.”

Lucy snorted a laugh, finding the addendum of “K” comical. “Well, I would hope that a two hundred quid bribe would be below you . . .”

“It’s not a bribe, Lucy, Christ. It’s . . . for the greater good.”

“The greater good.”

“Aye, Lucy. That fucker will be dead. . I can afford to divorce Queen Bitch. We can do this, Lucy.”

“Right,” Lucy said. “There’s that word again, “we . . . “

“That’s it, Lucy. We. We are going to be together Lucy, forever.”

Decker looked at her now, his pale blue eyes consuming her hazels. He was ashamed, the look said. It also said that he loved Lucy, and he hated sex traffickers. That he especially hated Florin Panescu.

“Once Panescu’s gone . . .” he said, his words augmenting his look. “You’ve seen some of the girls he’s taken. The Bradford sisters.”

“And how,” Lucy asked, prodding Decker in the ribs, “are WE going to achieve this?”

Decker looked at her, and told her the plan.

Signed it off with, “I love you, Lucy.”

*

That evening, Decker picked Lucy up from the car park of Boundary Mills retail park, out in the Pennines. Aside from its early onset Christmas decorations – this was mid-November – the retail park was far enough from mutual acquaintances, a place nondescript enough to be an unlikely precedent to any kind of misdoing.

Excluding, for one evening only, a gangland execution.

They said little, went over the plan. No small talk. Decker pulled his MG out of the car park, growling at a boy racer who cut him up.

“Phil,” said Lucy. “Easy.” Phil nodded. Nosed the MG onto the A56.

Reverting to silence as they cut into the night, the MG rasping as it powered towards Skipton. Minutes, silent, darkness-soaked minutes, tumbled by. Before they could enter Skipton’s limits, Phil indicated left, taking a road that led them to empty villages that had become familiar to Lucy in the course of her time in the task squad: Forlby, Gargrave, Flasby. Fewer and fewer car lights were illuminating Phil’s face as Lucy snuck glances at the man she believed she loved. The man with who she would be committing murder. By the time Phil had navigated the twisting roads and the barn was in sight, they were all alone in the depths of the Yorkshire Dales. He parked at the top of the track. Lucy took off her seatbelt.

“Find it? Under your seat?”

“Yes. Course. It’s in my pocket now.” Lucy patted her window-side pocket. The “it” was a zip-lock bag in which a Colt gun and a burner phone were stashed. Both sourced from connections from the London people; yet more proof of their booming social standing.

“Phone’s charge, gun’s loaded,” said Phil. “I’ll call when he goes past me. It’ll ring once. When you’ve secured him, you ring back. Ring once. That’s it. No voices.”

“I know,” said Lucy.

“Set?” asked Phil.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll get on with it,” said Lucy, before exiting the car, firing up a small Maglite torch and striding with purpose towards the barn.

It took until Lucy had reached the puddle-strewn track that led to the barn for Phil to fire up his MG and roar away.

*

Lucy walked to the barn, the plan looping in her mind. Decker would call Lucy on a burner once Panescu’s reg had pinged the task force boffins’ algorithms, which would let them know he was a fair way up the A1. This information would automatically be sent to Decker’s mobile.

Lucy would surprise and detain Panescu and his drugs at the barn, Decker would join her, shoot Panescu, drive her and the drugs away. She had questions, one of which was about the sourcing of the guns that the two of them would be using to detain and kill Panescu.

“The London people persuaded one of the Chinese’s allies to come over and join their . . . business. Managed to get them to bring a couple of their guns, too.” Another question regarded their cover-up story, “Tip-off from a CS. We got here to find the scene. We suspect the London people . . .”

Lucy had rolled her eyes at this latest mention of the Londoners. “Christ, Phil, are you sponsored by the London people?”

Before she could go over things another time, her phone rang once.

*

By the time Panescu’s Jeep came to a juddering halt and the man entered the barn, Lucy had ducked behind a broken door and watched him walk heavily across the floor to the strongbox, jabbering distastefully at, Lucy presumed, the ambient, rancid stench of shit and death. On that count, the two were avidly agreed. His face was momentarily illuminated by his phone’s torchlight, one that Lucy had seen countless times in 2D becoming rounded in all known dimensions. Lucy, heart beating like a squash court, had felt for her gun. Had emerged from her hiding spot as Panescu knelt to fiddle with the strongbox.

She screamed, “Freeze!” as Panescu made to unlock it. He looked up, wary rather than startled.

Lucy clicked off the safety, took a step closer. “Put your hands on your head, turn around, then place your hands on the wall,” she said.

Panescu spoke now, muttering, “Of course.”

He held his hands up, achingly slowly towards his head. Turned, inched his hands to the wall.

“On your knees.”

Panescu sank to his knees.

Lucy stared at him. “You piece of shit,” she said. Panescu shrugged. Then stood. Then walked towards her.

“One more step and I’ll . . .”

Panescu interrupted. “Shoot? Eh, go for it.”

Lucy numbed her mind, pulled the trigger, and waited for the report of the gun to torpedo her hearing, for the evil bag of flesh bones and inhumane brain matter to become just another dead criminal.

Neither happened. Before she could process this, Panescu was rushing straight for her. He bodychecked her, winding her immediately, then grabbed her, swung her around, and sent her sprawling towards the box. Muttering as she gasped for breath, he pinned her prostrate with monstrous force to the urine-soaked straw that barely softened the impact against the cold, concrete floor of the barn.

He bundles her arms behind her back, effortlessly holding them together with a single, huge hand, while the other searches for something in his pocket. Lucy focusses her energy in recapturing her breath, but was aware of the sound of tinkling metal, then felt something cold clicking around her right wrist. Just when she thought she was going to pass out, he relented little by little, until he had backed away. By the time Lucy was breathing, Panescu had pulled her to an iron fixing, was sat cross-legged in front of her, and had produced a gun of his own.

“You’re not so blonde in the flesh,” he said. Smirking.

Lucy spat in disgust. The hell did he know about her?

Panescu gestured toward the strongbox with his gun. “Open it,” he said. “Is not locked, now.”

With her free hand, Lucy opened the box. Inside was a yellow laminated envelope, and a large camera with a clunky flash. A syringe filled with a clear fluid, plugged with a needle.

“The envelope, open it,” ordered the man.

Lucy opened it. Inside were polaroid photographs. The top one was of a girl, pale, bruising around her eyes.

“Rebecca, I think,” said the man. “Twenty thousand for her. Profit, that is. Okay looking. Big user.”

“Look at the next one.”

A young Asian woman looked at the camera, listless.

“Ah, Priya,” cackles the man, showing off yellow teeth, and although clean-shaven, a dense stain of imminent stubble was spread across his jowls.

“£40,000 profit on her. Clean. Not a user. Family hate her. Wouldn’t marry some fucker they told her she must, in an arranged wedding, yes?

Dread surged through Lucy’s veins. Priya looked familiar.

“That’s not . . . her name is Uzma . . .”

The man cackled, “Ha! Well maybe once. But she’s Priya now. And she is definitely a user now, ha! Anyway – Lucy, yes? –

Lucy looked away.

The man took this as confirmation.

“I think you’re going to break the record. A policewoman . . . you are going to have a lot of filthy fuckers wanting to nail you. TO hurt you.”

Lucy stared back at the man.

Stole a look at the scythe.

The man smiled, his watery eyes not leaving Lucy’s. “Resourceful, Lucy. I have to be careful with you, huh? Think you’ll whip that fucking thing off the wall and smash me with it?”

The man’s smile died. “Move to the side.”

Lucy refused.

The man clicked his gun. Pointed it at her leg. “Fucking now, Lucy.”

Lucy crawled to the side.

The man went to the strongbox and took out the camera. “Young woman like you, even know what this is? Old school is best, yes? No digital trail.”

“Now, look at me. If you don’t, I’ll rape you before I sell you. I deserve my piece. I was hiding out in the fucking cold for hours waiting for you, bitch. Now. Cheese? Say cheese?”

The man took Lucy’s photo. Placed the camera on a rickety wooden shelf. The polaroid began to process.

“This takes a little while, “ he said. “You fucking young probably don’t know. Gives us a little time to talk before our lift arrives.”

The man pulled out his phone. “10 minutes, and he’ll be here.” chuckled. “I think I will get discount. You definitely not proper blonde.

Lucy tried to block the man out. She could just about reach the wallet of polaroids and picked through more of them.

“Yes, yes, feel free to look at your future colleagues . . . Maybe you meet them soon? Some of our clients, they like girls who work in pairs, groups. They all had their first picture taken in barn. Maybe not this one, but . . .”

Lucy lurched at the man with her free arm, slicing at his face with a polaroid photo. The man screamed.

“My fucking eyes!”

He held one hand up to his eye, and with the other juggled with the gun. Lucy had anticipated this and kicked the hand, sending the weapon sprawling across the barn floor, into the drain. She kicked again, hard as she could, at his shape. He roared and span, but so much blood gushed from his eye that it obscured his vision from both eyes. He swung wildly with his arms, missing Lucy, who concentrated on picking his pocket. She found the key, uncuffed herself and ran to the scythe. The man was too busy trying to flush the blood from his eyes to witness her taking the scythe and circling to his rear, wielding her weapon. Smashing in against his massive back. He fell unconscious. Lucy cuffed him to the strongbox, hoping he doesn’t have a secondary key on his person.

Lucy took the man’s phone, but couldn’t unlock it. Still, it gave her a little light. She went to the barn and ran across the field.

*

Decker slows the MG as he approaches the barn, aware that something is trying to lift itself from the endless acres of mud surrounding the godforsaken place.

Seeing that it’s Lucy, he brings his car to a stop. Exits, and walks her way, turning on his phone torch which shines obscenely bright in her eyes.

“Phil . . . he . . .” cries his young lover.

“You didn’t ring, Lucy. I’ve been worried. What happened? Panescu, is he . . .”

“He charged me! I tried to shoot, but it . . .failed, Phil. What the hell, Decker?”

Decker’s silhouette nods, a black angel in the torch-and-starlight. “What happened to you . . . can’t you walk?”

“For god’s sake, Phil, help me up! Think I’ve broken my ankle.”

“Shit, Lucy. Shit.” Phil sighs, sounding aggravated rather than worried. Where’s Panescu?”

“In the barn. Handcuffed him, and I think I knocked him out. But I think he’s stirring, and I can’t say he hasn’t got a spare key, or weapon on him.”

Decker dropped his phone to his side, nodded. “Right. I’ll go and see. You really can’t walk? Can’t stand?”

“If I could would I still be laid in this bloody shitheap, Phil?”

“Alright.”

“Can you carry me to the car . . .”

“One minute, Lucy. I need to check on Panescu. Finish him. Finish this.”

“Phil, help . . .”

“Wait there.”

“Like I can go . . .”

“Shut up. Wait.”

Decker reaches into his jacket, pulls out his gun. Heads to the barn.

Lucy manages to twist her body, sit up and face the barn. If Panescu has managed to work himself free, if Decker’s gun fails.

If, if, if.

She hears shouting. Anger.

But no instructions. No threats. No one is telling the other to keep still. Neither sound scared for their life.

No gunshots. No violence.

Lucy realises they are arguing.

She catches the odd word. Blonde. Liar. Eyes. Blind. Bitch.

Blonde.

You’re not so blonde in the flesh, Panescu had said.

He trafficks people, Lucy. Women, was what Decker had said.

Other things Decker said stir from her memories, like monsters rising from the mud.

The greater good.

I can afford to divorce Queen Bitch.

Lucy gasps, turns her body around, and breaks through the pain barrier as she scrabbles towards the MG, her ankle pulsing with fire, as if a flaming meteorite has screamed from the sky, smashed its weight and unearthly, searing temperature directly to its bones and tissues.

The voices continue. But the argument seems to if not resolved, then softened. Become amicable.

Other things that Phil said come back to her. The London people. The fucking London people.

Panescu is the London people.

Lucy has reached the car. In his haste to see what was going on, she hopes that Phil has left the MG unlocked. She reaches for the door handle. It takes a few attempts, but she makes it. Tries it.

The door opens.

With an effort that stretched and burned every cell in her body, Lucy pulls herself into the driver’s seat.

Hopes that Decker has not only left his beloved MG unlocked, but that he’s deigned to leave his keys in the ignition.

Despite everything, the shit that has worked inside her nostrils, the fact that two men are coming to either kill her or ensure the rest of her life is spent in slavery, the fact her ankle is broken, the thing that really stinks is Phil Decker’s aftershave. The kind of thing that the boyracer who cut him up at the roundabout would wear; fake, cheap, shit.

The one time Lucy had seen Decker with Queen Bitch, she had been surprised at how happy they looked together. How happy Decker looked, as he ate a steak meal with his wife in a well-heeled Leeds restaurant, while Lucy watched from across the street, doing her due diligence on the man whom she would be spending the rest of her life with.

Would have been.

The key is not in the ignition.

Lucy opens the car door, falls out onto the track.

Decker and Panescu reach her in a few seconds. Despite the woolly-mammoth levels of hairiness she’s stuck in, it pleases her to see that she has caused major damage to one, maybe both, of the bastard’s eyes.

Her smile vanishes when he speaks. “I rape her now.”

“No, I can’t have that, Florin.”

Lucy screams at Phil, who takes a step towards her and boots her in the face. Her head bounces on the road.

“I did like her, Florin.”

“Then why you sell her?”

“Well. I didn’t . . . you know, love her.”

“Then I fucking rape her! What she did to my eyes!”

“I’m grateful, Florin. She made me realise I did love my wife.”

Lucy murmurs, “Jesus, Phil, you evil . . .”

“Shoot her, mate. You can shoot her or take her away. But you can’t rape her, no, fella. Not having that.”

Through blood-encrusted eyes, Panescu squints at Decker and then Lucy.

“I got a lot of earning in her. Can’t shoot her.”

Decker looks to Panescu.

“Well, take her. Just . . . don’t rape her, right?”

He is willing for me to be a sex slave. Was paid to let me become a sex slave, Lucy thinks. But he sees himself as some kind of nobleman because he won’t let him rape me, though he can drive off and do pretty much what he wants to me.

“He already did, Phil,” says Lucy, suddenly.

“What! Eh, shut your mouth, fucking Lucy,” sneers Panescu.

“Why? It’s true. You raped me.”

“You lie, crazy bitch,” Panescu snarled.

Decker growled. “That wasn’t part of this, mate.”

Before Panescu can protest, Lucy says, “After he handcuffed me, he injected me with something. I was out of it . . . came round, and he was on top of me, forcing himself inside me. There’s blood, I can show you!”

Decker turned to Panescu, who laughed, apparently unconcerned. “She lie, Decker! What you care if I did, you sell her. You have no . . .”

Decker raised his gun, levelling it at Panescu before he has a chance to respond in kind. “Shut the fuck up. This is business. Whatever shit you do doesn’t happen in the meeting place, right? You stupid fat fuck, there’ll be blood in the straw . . . both your fucking fluids.”

The men were staring at each other now, Decker’s twisted gallantry meeting with Panescu’s violent cruelty.

“Oh come on Decker. Bitch just trying to get out. It’s fucking working too, you stupid fucking fucker.”

Decker clicks off the safety. “I said, shut. The. Fuck. Up.”

Turning to face Lucy, he says, “Show me.”

“What?”

Decker shrugged, his eyes impassive.

“You said there’s blood, Luce. Show me.”

Luce, thinks Lucy, After everything, he’s calling me Luce.

She flicks a look toward Panescu, who is sporting a small, sick grin. Knows as well as she does that Decker’s monstrous ego could be his downfall.

“There is no London people, are there Phil?”

“Show me, Lucy. Don’t let me find out you’re lying about this.”

“The two hundred grand is purely what you’re selling me for, isn’t it?”

“Fucking unzip your TROUSERS, Lucy. Show me!”

“You’re right, no one cares about a bit of coke. But a trafficker . . . it’s not just the Chinese trafficking women and children, is it? It’s your new best buddy, Panescu.”

“It’s a shit world, Lucy. Now take your fucking trousers off or your world will be a lot fucking shitter.”

“What, a world worse than being sold for evil fuckers like you to rape and torture me? Fuck off, Phil. You’ve seen me take my trousers off for the last time.”

“I didn’t rape you! What’ya talking about? Fucking rapist, that’s not me!”

“You had sex with me under false pretences. To me, that’s rape. You’re no better than that fucker there.”

“One more word out of you Lucy and I’LL FUCKING SHOOT YOU MYSELF!”

“No, no shooting, she mine!” roars Panescu as he rushes Decker. Too slowly to stop Decker swivelling around and shooting him in the head.

The huge Romanian drops to the floor as his brain matter and his blood finally make good on Decker’s plan that Lucy believed she was working to, and spritz across the barn floor.

“SHIT!” yells Decker. “Shit, shit, SHIT!”

“What’s up Phil,” Lucy whispers. “Just shot your paymaster?”

Decker looks at Lucy, colder than ice.

Lucy feels the chill that emanates from Decker. The man sickens her. The man who seduced her, promised her the world. Whose twisted self-regard is going to leave him with nothing.

Whose eyes are locked onto Lucy’s. Whose hand is raising the gun aloft.

“Phil, this doesn’t have to be the . . .”

A gunshot rings out across the farmland, echoing out into the Dales, but fades way before it can climb any higher into the night sky, a billion miles short of the dead stars whose light continues to glow above the barn.

A minute later, a second shot comes. Like the first, it’s absorbed by the night.