Without waiting for a reply, he stood up.
Livingstone hesitated for a moment, but then he followed suit. After all, what real choice did he have? As he watched, the giant went behind the bar and felt for a hidden switch on the side of the cabinet. Something clicked and, placing his enormous hands on one side, he gave it a firm pull. Rotating smoothly outward, the bar opened on concealed hinges like a conventional door. ‘Follow me,’ Goliath said, and stepped inside the gap that had appeared.
Livingstone cautiously crossed the room to join his host, and discovered a dimly lit stairway that descended down to who knew where.
‘I must apologise for those two idiots at the VIP entrance, Fam,’ Goliath said, his words echoing all around them in the confined space. ‘I assure you they were told to expect you, and the way that they behaved was not professional. I will speak to them about that, you can be assured.’
Livingstone ignored the apology. ‘Where are we going, bruv?’ he demanded, wondering if he was being dicked around. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you, and I’m very anxious to discuss my situation, know what I’m saying? How long is this work you’ve got to do likely to take?’
‘Don’t worry, Fam,’ Goliath soothed. ‘This won’t take long at all, and then you can have my undivided attention.’
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Goliath pulled open a thickly padded door. He stepped into a three-foot recess and paused. ‘The room we are about to enter is completely soundproofed,’ he announced proudly. ‘You could be standing on one side of the door while I stood on the other firing a machine gun. You would not hear it.’ Motioning with his head for Livingstone to follow, Goliath pushed open an identically padded door and stepped into what appeared to be a brightly lit storage area.
As Livingston followed him in, he immediately recognised the large open space as the basement area he had seen earlier on CCTV. Only it was no longer empty. The entire floor had been covered with thick plastic sheeting. Two men, both black, both in their late twenties, had been beaten, bound to chairs that were bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and gagged. The men were clad only in their boxers, and their faces were bloodied and swollen.
The one nearest him was a runt of a man who seemed to be all skin and bone. He sported a big afro haircut like the ones that had been popular in the seventies, and from the smell of it, he had soiled himself. Thankfully, his incessant blubbering was being largely muffled by a filthy gag that had been forced deep into his mouth.
The head of the male furthest away, a short and rather plump individual with a receding hairline, was slumped forward onto his chest, which was covered in blood from where his nose and mouth had recently bled profusely. His chest rose and fell slowly, telling Livingstone that he wasn’t dead, just unconscious.
This was madness. ‘What the fuck are you involving me in, bruv?’ Livingstone demanded angrily.
‘Don’t worry, Fam,’ Goliath assured him, ‘nothing that happens here will come back to bite you. Of that you have my word,’
Livingstone had learned the hard way that you never took anyone’s word for anything. For a moment, he considered turning around and walking away, leaving the club while there was still time to distance himself from whatever was about to go down. But if he did that, his plan would be over and he would have come all this way for nothing.
I hope you’re as good as your reputation suggests, he thought, studying Goliath uneasily.
‘Someone is going to die in this room tonight, Fam,’ Goliath casually announced. ‘They will die brutally, and by my hand, but no one will ever be able to prove that I did it, or that the killing took place in this room.’
Livingstone recalled that a live feed from this room was being recorded on the equipment up in the manager’s office. His eyes urgently sought out the camera. When he found it, mounted high on the wall behind the two men, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Clever, he thought. Very clever,
A ten-by-eight-inch photograph had been expertly positioned in front of the camera’s lens. Livingstone immediately realised that he had been looking at this photograph on the manager’s monitor, and not at the actual basement itself. It had fooled Livingstone, and it would fool the police if they ever seized the club’s CCTV.
‘Let’s begin,’ Goliath decreed, beaming his vampire smile once more. ‘These men distribute product for an associate of mine,’ he explained. ‘Although they were well compensated for their services, one of them got greedy and started skimming the profits. My associate has asked me to establish who it is, and to deal with him appropriately. We were just getting started when Isaac called me to say you were outside.’
Livingstone remained silent. He had witnessed violent deaths before and was completely unfazed by the prospect of seeing another. All that worried him was that he might be dragged into the ensuing police investigation if Goliath was sloppy about the clean-up.
Grabbing a handful of hair, Goliath yanked the man’s head back and stared down into his terror-stricken face. ‘I’m hoping it’s you, Tyrone, and not Drake, here. I really am,’ he told his prisoner. ‘Just between you and me, I’ve never liked you, and I would very much enjoy killing you.’
Shaking uncontrollably, the other man’s eyes widened, and a howl of anguish escaped his lips. His bladder gave way again, causing a dark stain to spread across his lap and a yellow liquid ran down the side of his leg to form a small pool by his feet
Goliath turned his nose up in disgust. ‘You do not endear yourself to me by doing that,’ he said.
Tyrone started wailing again.
