The House of Killers

by Samantha Lee Howe

  Bright writhes on the floor, choking. He reaches out to the wall beside him to try and lever himself to his feet. The look in his eyes tells her that he knows what this is about. He will never be able to admit that, though, not with a crushed larynx.

  His eyes bulge; he’s getting air, but not enough. She thinks about letting him suffer – perhaps for all those nerdy girls he’s plied with drink and then forced himself on in the past – but Neva has bigger fish to fry and it will serve no purpose to delay. She reminds herself that she is not an avenging angel – that way madness lies; she is a woman with a paying job to do. The thought steadies her.

  She picks up her handbag from the floor. It has everything she needs inside.

  He tries to croak a plea for his life. Pathetic really. And pointless. That’s when Neva lets her knife drop down from the holster around her wrist.

  ‘I asked you a question. But it’s clear you’re not much of a thinker or you would know that your activities have been observed. But let me not frustrate you. The reverse of heaven is hell, or in my case—’

  She stops as she becomes aware that she is talking more than usual. Babbling her thoughts like an amateur.

  ‘Pl … ease…’ he croaks.

  He manages to get up onto his knees; the colour is returning to his cheeks.

  ‘You have some fight left in you. Interesting. But this is what you get for being a nosey parker. Your employers were clear that they wanted you to know what you’ve done.’

  The knife moves through the air, one clean swipe. She’s adept at using it and it’s still her first weapon of choice.

  His hand grabs at his throat in a clumsy attempt to stop the flow but blood seeps through his fingers unchecked. Then, as shock takes effect, he pitches forward. Neva leaves him bleeding on the laminate floor. She observes that the cheap surface will soak up the blood and be damaged beyond repair. In the end, material things don’t matter.

  The hallway is warm, but not overly hot. There are four doors on the left. The first is the living room, the second a kitchen, the third is the bedroom and the fourth is the room she is looking for.

  On entering the flat, she had slipped on a pair of leather gloves. Now she takes them off, putting them into a plastic bag that she withdraws from the pocket of her coat. She pulls on a fresh set of surgical gloves taken from the handbag, then opens the door to the bathroom. She glances inside, observing it is clean, and that no one else is there. Inside, she rinses her blade then stows it back in her wrist holster. From her purse she brings out a small bottle, containing bleach, which she splashes around the sink. She cleans it of all sign of the blood from the blade then returns the empty bottle to her bag.

  In the kitchen she finds the mark’s laptop. It is plugged in, charging. She opens it and finds his emails. Most people have their passwords stored on their personal machines, thinking them safe. The mark is no different and so it isn’t long before Neva has full access. Without opening or reading anything, she deletes the contents of the inbox. Then she clears the deleted files, removing them permanently from the email handler. After that, she inserts a pen drive into the USB port, then initiates a complete reset of the device, wiping all files as part of the process using a specific programme. It won’t be easy for anyone else to check what the mark has been doing.

  Leaving the process running, she knocks over the tea and coffee canisters, spilling the contents over the work surface and onto the floor. Pushing over one of the breakfast bar stools, she finishes by pulling out and shattering his crockery. When this is done, the room looks as though it has been ransacked.

  She does the same in the living room – tipping chairs, opening and rifling through the sideboard, knocking books from a shelf until everything is in turmoil. She destroys the bedroom in the same way.

  After that she returns to the kitchen, takes back her pen drive, and goes back to the hallway.

  The mark is lying on his side, dead. It hasn’t taken long for him to bleed out.

  She turns him over and searches his pockets, finding his mobile phone. Thankfully, there’s no passcode on the device. She refreshes the mailbox and watches as everything clears out of the mobile app inbox and deleted files. Then she restores the phone to factory settings, erasing anything that might lead the authorities back to her employers. When the phone restarts, she returns it to his pocket. Next, Neva removes his wallet. She takes all cash and cards, placing them in another clear plastic bag that she withdraws from her jacket pocket. She folds the bag closed, then puts the package back in her pocket. After that, she drops the mark’s wallet on the floor beside his corpse.

  She hasn’t touched anything without her gloves on, but she pulls a pack of wipes from her other pocket and wipes down the door handles in the hallway as an extra precaution. She bunches up the used wipes and puts them and the pack away in the inside pocket of her jacket.

  She glances at the mark’s face, looks at his glassy eyes, and presses her fingers to his pulse to confirm that he has gone. She notes again how good-looking he was.

  Looks do not make the man…

  Then she turns away and forgets all about this observation.

  She takes a quick photograph of him on her mobile, then sends it to the only number stored on the phone. A few seconds later, the phone vibrates as a text arrives.

  She glances at the message:

  Payment sent

  Then she takes the sim card out of the phone, snaps it in half, and places it in another clear bag and back into the pocket that holds the mark’s money and cards.

  Still wearing her gloves, she opens the flat door and looks down the corridor. They didn’t pass anyone on the way up and Neva had been careful to keep her face turned away from the other doors, just in case one of them has a camera. She closes the door, then takes a short crowbar out of her bag. Casting a glance around, she uses the bar to break the lock, then she pushes the door half open. Her eyes fall once more on the vase of flowers, then she turns and walks away.

  Several streets away from the flat, a homeless man is sleeping in the doorway of a hardware shop. Neva takes the money and cards out of her pocket. Removing them from the plastic bag, she drops the wad down onto the man’s sleeping bag. She hurries away.

  Further along the street, she drops the sim card down into a drain at the side of the road. She drops the burner phone on the ground and smashes and grinds it with her heel, then dumps the pieces in a bin outside the off-licence.

  Removing the wig and glasses, she stuffs them into another plastic bag. A few minutes later, she boards a bus heading out of town.

  Chapter Three

  MICHAEL

  ‘Security Agent Michael Kensington,’ I say, flashing the MI5 crest at Constable Ealing. Ealing recognises the badge and steps back to allow me entrance to the flat.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Neighbour found him. Looks like a robbery. His name is … was Aidan Bright.’

  ‘I know.’

  The constable goes quiet. He probably thinks I’m an arrogant tosser. I don’t put him right because it doesn’t really matter what the man thinks of me. I’m here to do my job and that is to study the crime scene first-hand to see if this gives me any insight into the killer. I examine the door, which has been forced and seems to back up the assumption that this was a robbery gone wrong.

  I look down at the body in the hallway. He’s slumped forward, as though he was on his knees begging for his life seconds before his life was taken. I bend down and see the clean wound at his throat. The cause of death is obvious. I don’t disturb the body.

  ‘Forensics are on the way. Did you touch anything?’

  ‘Tried not to, sir.’

  ‘Good.’

  I walk away from the corpse and follow the route through the flat that I suspect the killer will have taken. In my mind’s eye, I shadow the assassin’s route to the bathroom, while pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. As I open the door, there is a strong smell of bleach – a sure sign
that this room has been cleaned of all evidence. A jolt of anticipation rattles through my blood. I recognise the modus operandi: I’ve been tracking this assassin for years and they are always meticulous. All surfaces will be wiped down. Forensics won’t find anything, but I search anyway. There is room for error; one day this killer will make a mistake and I will find it. But I know, as I look around, whose file this will go into and it’s a profile I’ve been studying ever since I joined Archive.

  I walk to the sink and look down, eyes scanning the porcelain for anything, even a strand of hair. Then I open the medicine cabinet. It appears that nothing has been touched.

  Aidan Bright had been a person of interest for a while. He worked at Elgin Beeson, an armament manufacturer. Bright had been little more than a credit clerk with low-grade military clearance but MI5 saw him as a possible danger to security because the man had tendencies that made him open to future blackmail, or imprisonment. So, when the emergency call came through, the agency picked up on it. That’s why I’m the first real authority to arrive on the scene.

  I look around the flat, touching nothing, but taking photographs of the destruction for further study. Homicide are likely to come up with a scenario that shows Bright returning home, catching a burglar, and then the culprit turning on him. This isn’t the case. This is a professional job, and Bright was dead before the ransack even took place.

  ‘Robbery gone wrong?’ the constable asks as I return to the hallway.

  I don’t answer, but I can tell the constable doubts what he sees too. The turning over of the flat is too precise. This, perhaps, is the flaw I’ve been looking for. Any opportunist burglary and would-be homicide would show signs of panic. There are none here, and I didn’t expect to find any.

  Even though I’m only a few years older than the constable, I think, This young man will be one to watch for the future. He’s smart; I see it in his expression, despite his silence, or maybe because he knows when not to ask questions.

  Sometimes I feel old, as though I’ve been in this line of work for longer than I have, because dealing with the things I see, on a daily basis, changes you. But would I ever change what I do? I doubt it. I analyse the joy I feel in discovering this is the assassin and I wonder what Ray would think if he knew that catching this one was something of an obsession.

  ‘Thank you, constable,’ I say. ‘You may allow forensics to do what’s needed and to take the body. They know who to report to.’

  My eyes fall then on a vase of daffodils on the table by the door. One of the petals has fallen onto the table. In my mind’s eye, I see the assassin pausing to touch the flowers; days old, they were fragile and ready to break. Somehow it feels significant. It niggles at my mind but I don’t know why.

  ‘The flat was turned over,’ I explain, ‘but not for robbery. It was staged.’

  Archive’s office is based in central London, an unimposing building not far from Borough Market, and disguised as a publishing company. Archive is on the top floor. There the serious work takes place, not the real, and thriving, business we are disguised as. My office is just off a central room that my colleagues Bethany Cane and Leon Tchaikovsky work in. Down the hallway is Ray’s office, which also doubles as our briefing room. We are in there now, and I flick through the photographs on a large screen as the four of us sit around the conference table, each behind a computer whose screen we can share. We have been working on this case for years but every new piece of the puzzle we find always leads us away from finding this assassin and, more importantly, the person hiring them. This time, however, I feel like I’ve learnt something about the killer that we didn’t know before.

  I am Ray’s second, and Beth and Leon have equal status in our hierarchy. Beth is in her thirties. She’s been with Archive a year less than me, and Leon, who is also in his mid-thirties, started a little before. We are a young team but for Ray, who is now approaching his fifties.

  Although he tries not to show it, Leon has a little chip on his shoulder about the fact that I was promoted and he was overlooked. He’s quieter than me at the briefings, but that’s usually because I am sharing my insights with the team. I generally work better with Beth, as she is easy company and always contributes a great deal to any discussions, but also because I don’t feel that underlying resentment for my position coming from her. She appears content with where she is.

  ‘You think it’s the same assassin?’ Beth asks now.

  ‘Yes. The use of the knife, the wiping and bleaching to remove evidence. It fits the MO of kills all in the last few years. But I also think it’s the same person who buried and placed flowers on the grave of our mysterious Jane Doe some years back.’ I explain the feeling I got when I saw the daffodils in Bright’s flat.

  ‘Could be a coincidence,’ Ray chips in. ‘But I’m all about gut instinct, as you know.’

  I nod, as we’ve had this discussion many times. Instinct is everything in our job.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continue. ‘That’s why I think this is our girl…’

  ‘Girl? How do you deduce that?’ says Leon.

  ‘Bright’s death has given us a breakthrough. I believe he brought a woman back with him and she killed him.’

  ‘We’ve known Bright’s tendencies for a while,’ Beth says, backing me up much to Leon’s annoyance. ‘So, it’s likely they used a woman to lure him.’

  In the past year, several women had come forward all claiming that Bright had raped them. Each time, somehow the slippery little bastard managed to get an alibi. There was never any DNA: he always used a condom, and then forced the girl to shower afterwards. Bright was a serial rapist who knew how to cover his tracks. The girls were often too shocked and afraid to come forward and those who did where made to look like liars. Even so, a case was being compiled against him. It was only a matter of time before he was arrested – an inconvenience for his employers, who, I’m sure, knew all about him.

  ‘Which is why,’ I conclude, ‘I think someone at Elgin Beeson hired the killer.’

  ‘But how can we prove that?’ Leon asks, as he’s all about fact and never lets us get away with conjecture.

  ‘We can’t,’ I say. ‘But we have to accept that the kind of power Beeson’s has will give them access to someone who can “remove” a future problem. Bright was that problem, and he might not have had much security clearance, but he had enough to have access to something he could use if he were arrested. At least, that’s my theory. But back to the girl. The assassin. What can we draw from this that will be a help?’ I look around the room and find all eyes waiting for me to fill in these gaps. Even Leon appears to be interested. ‘She’ll be wearing a deliberate disguise. Bright’s type. Beth, I have pictures here of all of the girls that were brave enough to come forward and report Bright. Take a look, will you? And let’s see if there’s any security footage in the area that might help to confirm my theory.

  ‘On it.’ Beth turns back to the computer she’s using. Within a few seconds, she’s accessed all the public cameras in the area and is fast forwarding through them looking for signs of anyone around the time of Aidan’s death.

  ‘We had a hit on Bright’s credit card…’ Leon says looking up from his computer. ‘Off-licence a few streets from his flat, if that helps to narrow it down.’

  Beth searches the cameras in that area.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ she says after a few minutes. ‘Dark-haired woman with black-rimmed glasses passed by a hardware store near the Phoenix off-licence on the corner of Tate Street. That’s Bright’s fetish for sure. I think you were right, Mike. We are looking for a woman.’

  ‘It still doesn’t prove someone at Beeson’s had him killed,’ Leon points out, ever the devil’s advocate.

  ‘No, but he was a liability,’ I say. ‘Put the footage up on the large screen, please, Beth.’

  Seeing her for the first time gives me something akin to an electric shock. My heart thumps in my chest as adrenaline rushes through my blood. The woman on the sc
reen is exactly the type that Bright went for. But this one, although mousy on the surface, walks with magnificent confidence. There is a presence about her, a grace of movement, and I imagine that even the tap of her heels on the pavement is silent. A poet would compare her to something predatory, even though the walk itself does not say aggression. She’s fascinating. This is the one we’ve been looking for. I just know it.

  ‘She’s about five-eight,’ I say. ‘Athletic, or with some dance training, judging by how she moves. She’s fully aware of her surroundings, totally in command of them. Look how she’s turning her face away; she knows the camera is there. Beth, can we get anything from face recognition?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘What was that?’ I say. ‘Rewind. She dropped something. On that vagrant. My guess is that he was the one using the card in the off-licence.’

  Beth nods. ‘Let’s hope he wasn’t as asleep as he appears. If we find him, we may have our very first living witness…’

  My phone beeps then with a reminder. I have a meeting arranged.

  ‘Lunch date?’ Beth says.

  ‘Yeah. Uncle Andrew,’ I say. ‘I’ll pick this up with you all later.’

  As I leave, I hear Beth say to Leon, ‘Do you think that guy really is his uncle?’

  I don’t hear Leon’s response.

  I meet Andrew in an Italian restaurant nearby. He’s never admitted that it was him who whispered in Ray Martin’s ear to get me the job at Archive. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It’s all worked out for the best. Andrew never asks me about what I do, and I never volunteer information. Our meetings are, for the most part, quite simple. It’s a relief, in many ways, from the darkness of my job.

  Chapter Four

  NEVA

  ‘Hey! You can’t get in that way!’ says a male voice.

  Neva looks at the man. She is wearing her long hair in two pigtails