Right to Kill

by John Barlow

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2021

  Copyright © John Barlow 2021

  John Barlow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © June 2021 ISBN: 9780008408879

  Version 2021-06-01

  Note to Readers

  This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008408855

  For Stef

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Thursday

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Friday

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Saturday

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Sunday

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Monday

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Tuesday

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Wednesday

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Chapter 47

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  1

  It happens so quickly. You’ve got no idea.

  Imagine you’re standing somewhere. A bus stop, a quiet road, the park. Somewhere familiar. Then the whole world tilts. There’s a massive rush, like the first breathless lunge down a roller-coaster. You’re carried forward, careering over yourself, unstoppable, so fast you can hardly think.

  A second and it’s done. You’re back where you started, and everything’s the same.

  Only everything’s different.

  It happens so quickly.

  Tuesday evening. I’ve taken a short stretch of road that runs beneath an old railway line just out of town. The high walls are damp, the Victorian brickwork almost black, forming a kind of semi-enclosed underpass.

  There’s no more than forty or fifty yards of it, including a sharp bend, right beneath where the trains used to go. Not many people come this way. It’s obsolete, little more than a nuisance for town planners.

  I like it. For the time it takes to go from one end to the other, the world feels empty, a silent snapshot of times gone by, not a soul to break the stillness.

  But tonight there’s a car. Maroon, a bit tatty. It’s parked up on the kerb, just after the bend. I move out and walk in the middle of the road, give it a wide berth. There’s a guy at the wheel. He’s alone and he’s watching me in his mirror. He has a baseball cap pulled down, but I can see his eyes.

  He lowers his head as I approach. It looks as if he might be in some sort of trouble. I slow down as I get level with him.

  Then he turns his head and looks at me.

  Now I know why he’s there.

  I’m not scared. When you’ve dealt with enough people like this you stop being afraid. But I’m curious. I want to know what he’s going to do now. So I stay where I am, in the middle of the road.

  He lets the electric window down, looking straight at me as it opens.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask, good citizen voice.

  He nods very slightly. Nasty eyes. They all have the same eyes. Doesn’t matter how old they are. And this one’s not old. Mid-twenties, scrawny body, bony face.

  ‘Good!’ I say, upbeat, friendly.

  I want him to know I’m not scared.

  His eyes are small and ugly, animal eyes.

  ‘You need somethin’?’ he asks.

  I shake my head.

  He exhales, looks away, and even his boredom seems evil. It annoys me, that casual gesture. But it’s also meant to be threatening. I get ready to go. I’ve had enough.

  ‘Right, great!’ I say. ‘I’ll be off!’

  Screw him. I’ll get a photo of his number plate when I’m at the top of the road, up by the entrance to Tesco’s car park. The police can have him.

  ‘Yeah, go fuck yourself,’ he says, a spasm of irritation running through his angular body.

  I freeze.

  ‘I… I’m sorry?’

  I feel myself moving towards the car.

  ‘Go on. Leg it, yer nosy twat.’

  The world lurches violently. My body floods with something ice-cold and utterly terrifying. I feel myself being carried at unimaginable speed to a place I’ve never been. It only takes a second.

  ‘I was worried,’ I explain, moving closer.

  My hand reaches out, fingertips touching the roof of the car.

  This can’t be right, but it feels right. I don’t know why. Everything’s changed. That’s all I know.

  ‘Worried,’ I repeat.

  My other hand slips inside my jacket. I lean in until my body touches the driver’s door. What am I searching for? What am I doing?

  Then I find it. Between my fingers. A pencil. I can feel its smooth hexagonal shaft, its strange steely rigidity. This can’t be right. But it must be. My world twists irrevocably on its axis. My roller-coaster moment.

  ‘I… just…’ I say, leaning further in to him.

  But he’s not listening. He’s not even looking at me. He’s looking straight ahead, like I’m not there.

  The point enters just above his eyeball, taking part of the upper eyelid with it. Easily, easily it goes in. Shockingly so. And shockingly fast, although in fact I’m calm, not shocked at all.

  His face hardly changes. There’s the slightest expression of surprise. But mild surprise, no more than that. It might be that he remains exactly as he is, and the lack of horror is somehow ex
pressive; peaceful, like he knows that this is what needs to be done, that I have no choice.

  The pencil slides right in.

  There must have been some force. But I can’t recall.

  When I let go only a couple of inches are sticking out. With the ball of my hand I push it in all the way.

  Then I wait, resting against the car.

  When his body starts to sag I know it’s over.

  That’s how it happens.

  So quickly.

  You’ve got no idea just how quickly it can all change.

  Everything.

  Thursday

  2

  Joe Romano reached for his mug and took a gulp. The coffee was stone-cold. He put it down on his desk amid a pile of case files. Break-ins mainly. There was another case open on his screen. Just admin for the insurance adjusters at this stage. Fiddly paperwork. Everything’s got to be right. This last one must have taken him, what, an hour?

  He clicked ‘save’, logged out of the system and looked across the open-plan operations room. The shift was winding down. People rose from their seats, attending to aching lumbar regions, exchanging friendly words with night-shift officers and support staff, who’d just begun to trickle in.

  ‘Joe! Fancy a drink?’

  A young man in a trim grey suit grinned. The question was ironic. Nothing new there. A few people looked over at Joe with a mixture of amusement and pity.

  ‘Or a bit of unpaid overtime? More your style, eh, Joe?’

  Detective Constable Gwyn Merchant was one rank lower, and a decade younger. But you’d never have known. Cocksure with a wardrobe to match. The kind of guy who rarely got creases in the trousers of his Paul Smith suits.

  He came across and handed Joe a slip of paper.

  ‘Misper. Only been gone a couple of days.’

  ‘Adult?’

  ‘Friggin’ scag,’ Merchant said, laughing, already walking away, thinking about his first pint. ‘His mammy rang it in. Worried sick. Bet she’s the only one.’

  ‘This is everything?’ Joe asked, looking at the paper in his hand.

  Merchant stopped, turned, as if the question was slightly impertinent.

  ‘Mum wasn’t making much sense when she called, apparently. I was his last arresting officer. So they sent it through to me.’

  ‘Right. I’ll look into it.’

  ‘Piece o’ shit. He’ll be off his tits in a gutter,’ Merchant said as he went back to his desk. ‘Or dead in a gutter. Either way, log it ’n’ leave it, unless you’ve nowt better on.’

  He patted his pockets, making sure he’d left nothing on his desk, and followed his mates towards the door. They all looked like they were gagging for a drink, for a laugh. CID officers? More like teenagers.

  On the slip of paper there was a phone number and a name: Craig Shaw. One of Merchant’s arrests? Joe didn’t recognize the name. No surprise there. After a year coordinating missing persons and break-ins, Joe’s knowledge of serious crime in Leeds was about as peripheral as it got.

  He logged back into the system for a quick look. It wasn’t as if anybody was going to be working at his desk tonight. It was an age since he’d handed over a live case to the night shift. At least this was a known individual. He could have a quick look for nothing.

  Craig Shaw’s file summary flicked up on the screen. A dozen entries, mainly arrests and cautions, but also a couple of convictions. Drugs. Such small-time stuff that the very lack of ambition was depressing. Selling blow on a couple of university campuses, amphetamines in a nightclub. One gram of coke. One bloody gram. He got eighteen months for that, suspended. A while later, the same thing. Two years this time. Out in less than one.

  Mugshot: face so thin he looked malnourished. An arrogant stare, something self-assured about the way he held his head up. And he was an ugly runt. Ugly and unpleasant. Merchant was probably right: who was going to be bothered that he’d gone missing?

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. Mrs Shaw rings the police a couple of days after her drug-dealing son disappears. The twenty-five-year-old son who presumably still lives at home. Now his mum’s worried sick. The whole thing was like a Johnny Cash song.

  Reining in his prejudice, he reminded himself of the official definition of a missing person: Anyone whose whereabouts is unknown, whatever the circumstances… obligation to protect the rights of citizens without discriminating on any grounds. He scrolled up the file, saw the address.

  ‘Really?’

  What else was he going to do of a Thursday night?

  3

  The Brick. Unusual name for a pub. He took his pint and went to stand outside the front doors. The light in the sky was fading fast, and there was an annoying February wind. In Leeds there’s always an annoying wind, unless there isn’t, then you wish there was. Either way, the weather’s always just a little bit shit. On the door was a poster, handwritten in thick black marker pen on bright orange paper: a DJ on Friday, a band on Saturday. What might have been, eh, Joe?

  Across the road from the pub was a strip of grass that sloped upwards, long and irregular, too steep to be of any use. Beyond it were half a dozen rows of back-to-back houses running all the way up the hillside, their chimney stacks jet-black against the evening sky. They were larger than average for the area. Good solid stuff. Turn of the century. The previous century.

  He sank a third of his pint. IPA? Bitter? He couldn’t remember what he’d ordered. It had the reassuring aroma of dusty rags and sweet mould. Real ale, the taste of his youth. Young lads today? Hardly any of ’em drank this stuff. He studied the pint glass in his hand. A young lad? Forty-eight hours he’d been gone. Could you even class that as missing? It was a decent bender, was all. Mum didn’t think so, though.

  He looked again at the houses. The one at the end had two little attics, a narrow, angled staircase leading up to them. Each room had a fireplace, an original ceramic surround with floral patterns in relief on the tiles, an unexpected touch of elegance. For his entire childhood, a small vase of plastic flowers had sat in each fireplace. Other than that, the rooms had stood bare and unused. They could never persuade their grandma to do anything with the attics. When she died, they sold the house to a mobile hairdresser. Did he still live there? Had he done anything with the top floor?

  DS Joe Romano spent the next couple of minutes wondering whether he could use his warrant card to talk his way into the house and have a quick look at the attics. While he was there, he might just pop down into the cellar and see if he could find his grandma’s old mangle.

  He finished his pint and considered another. It was only as he was walking back to the bar that he remembered why he was here. Mrs Shaw had lost her son and didn’t know where to find him.

  4

  The terraced houses down behind the Brick were a little less impressive than the ones over the way, where his grandparents had lived. Same vintage but not quite as large. Attics with staircases? Lofts more likely. Trapdoor in the ceiling. There were about a dozen streets, hypnotic in their sameness, something majestic in the repetition, age-darkened red brick houses lined up to order, one after the other, street after street, the columns of a Victorian terracotta army, imperious in its discipline.

  But as he walked up Claremont Road he noticed that the lintels of many houses had been painted in red or black gloss, and several houses had their entire façades done in sickly, brick-like colours. This wasn’t how he remembered the area. What had once been a latticework of neat, identical houses had mutated into something less uniform, dowdier, more random; wheelie bins outside, crappy double glazing, old satellite dishes that nobody’d bothered to take down. The odd nicely maintained one – white sash windows, a decent wooden door, the immediately recognizable patina of ordered living – looked out of place amid the general malaise, like a bloke wearing Harris tweed to go dogging.

  Wortley, West Leeds: the Romano family had been based here since the early 1900s. The area had seen better days. Then again, he thought as he made his
way along the street, wishing he’d had that second pint, you could say the same about the Romanos.

  As he stood there and knocked he felt the eyes of several people on him. Young, heavy-set adults who seemed to be there for no reason, nothing better to do, their front doors open, and them neither in nor out, just hanging around. He noted the gaudy colours of their casual, loose-fitting clothes, and it occurred to him that he, sporting a mid-grey Burton’s two-piece and a tie, was the one who looked out of place.

  ‘Mrs Shaw?’

  ‘Police?’ she said, standing well back from the door, which was open less than a foot.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Romano, Leeds CID. I’m here about Craig.’

  ‘You found him?’

  ‘I’ve only had his name an hour. Can I come in?’

  The door opened wider, with her squarely behind it. Joe went inside, and the door closed again quickly.

  She stank of smoke. The house did, but it came from her. A stale smell, one he knew well enough. Ex-smokers never forget. But here in the narrow entrance of the hall it was bitter and overpowering.

  She was average height, and about fifty, he reckoned, but thin and drawn. You could have added another ten years to that and no one would have argued.

  ‘I’ve got some questions about your son.’

  She lifted a hand. It seemed to shake. Even her arm was unsteady.

  ‘Front room?’ he asked.

  She nodded, lowering her arm and searching for the wall behind her, palm flat against it. She was pissed. That explained the front door. She hadn’t wanted to open it too much because she was off her face.

  He stepped into the front room and almost gagged. The stink of cigarettes was overlaid with an acrid stench of food, sweat and farts. He glanced at the windows, wondered how long it was since they’d been opened.

  ‘I don’t have anything to tell you, as of yet,’ he said, taking a seat on a large white leather sofa, one of two that took up most of the room, along with a huge TV in the corner, which was switched on, the volume turned down.

  She made her way to the other sofa and eased herself down onto it, turning the TV off with a remote.