[Eddie Collins 01.0] The Third Rule

by Andrew Barrett

  “When you wake up in the morning, your car will still be there, undamaged. Your shed won’t have been broken into and all your tools stolen. They won’t dare do it,” he smiled. “We’ll see to it. Give it a year or two,” he shouted, “and I’ll be surprised if there’s any crime left worth talking about. Of course, let’s be realistic; there will still be crime about, you’ll never stop it completely; but the kind of premeditated serious crime will be almost non-existent, the kind of spontaneous petty crime will have all but stopped too. The only crime left that affects the people in the street will be spontaneous serious crime. I hate to admit it, but that’s the kind of crime we may never stop. The Rules are there as a deterrent to the petty criminal and to the serious criminal who gives thought to his actions. And particularly against gun and knife crime, something that puts the very fear of God into every mother’s heart up and down the country.

  “And when these criminals are caught, they’ll learn not to do it again; society will not allow them to. If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals!”

  Flashguns blazed as Deacon raised his arm and grinned in a parting gesture. The crowd stood, their applause deafening, whoops and cheers and whistles. Even party-poppers erupted, something that caused Sirius, who waited in the wings, to grow nervous. He peeked around the curtain and watched his boss take the adulation before accepting Sterling’s hearty handshake and gliding gracefully off the stage, waving to his fans as he went.

  “How did it go?” he asked Justine Patterson, his aide and member of the PR team, after he was safely away from the microphones.

  “Looked great to me. It looked spontaneous, especially the part where you said ‘Where was I? Oh yes…’. That was wonderful. I congratulate you, George, on remembering it; it was word perfect.”

  – Two –

  Outside the conference hall, the police had cordoned off a section of the main road and the square. Large truck-mounted screens pumped Deacon’s speech out to the masses while other smaller screens, the vidiscreens, had crowds gathered around them. For the most part, the demonstrations were timid, mild-mannered affairs, where people expressed their opinion with a grunt or a nod. But there were two distinct factions to the crowd: one for The Rules and one against. And even in the ‘for’ camp, there were divisions. “Why do it with a bullet?” someone shouted. “Yeah, let’s hang the bastards,” someone replied.

  There were hundreds of people gathered in the square, some listening to the speech, most jeering and chanting loudly, drowning out Deacon with bullhorns. Banners swung in the breeze: “hooray for sanity”; “death to murderers”; “forgiveness is divine”; “help, not death”. There were posters showing the faces of children used and then slaughtered by paedophiles and other assorted twisted elements in society, and counteracting these were graphic depictions of dead men handcuffed to scarred wooden posts; more of freeze-frame shots showing a bullet passing through a human head; the tip of one breaking through the rear of the skull.

  Each faction had its point of view and each tried to outdo the other in words and volume and pictures and arguments, and in the middle, in the grey areas where the two elements joined, were the scuffles amongst PAC representatives and Freedom for Life campaigners.

  A female PAC member went down as a blade pierced her heart.

  12

  Friday 19th June

  Inside Jilly’s darkened lounge the tears still fell from eyes that were incessantly tired. They were immersed in loose dark folds of skin that filled the hollows of her skull like some Halloween mask. By God, you’d have thought the tears would have ended by now, maybe returning only intermittently, but no, here they were rolling down the same cheeks they had dampened for the last three weeks. It was a pain she couldn’t describe, even if she’d felt inclined to.

  She had rejected the offer of counselling; choosing instead the drugs and a deep trough of grief. Sammy was dead. And her heart was in two. The TV blared somewhere in the background as Jilly brought the cold coffee cup up to her lips; she was surprised to see it empty. Blankly she stared at the TV, a distraction that no longer distracted, just noise to fill an otherwise silent existence. Some politician, Deacon, spouted about the rights and wrongs of a society that was in jeopardy of not giving a damn anymore. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “The only way to kill serious crime is to kill serious criminals!”

  Her eyebrows rose at that statement. “Oh how wonderful. I’d like to pull the trigger,” she said without enthusiasm. “What a wonderful law.” She wondered where her son’s killer was now, what he was doing. Was he enjoying a pizza, flushing it down with a beer, laughing with his chums about how fucking clever he was? Or was he at home, sitting in a darkened room like she was, wondering about the point of it all? She suspected the former.

  She put the cup down, finding a place for it on the carpet among the other half dozen or so. Jilly stood and shuffled into the kitchen. The house smelled, the sink was full of dishes with dried-on food, flies munching away happily, undisturbed and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

  Her slippers scuffed the floor on the way to the drawer where she kept her medication. Aspirin and Hedex, indigestion tablets, and Calpol for when Sammy got a fever. Her Protromil nestled among it all and she greedily swallowed two capsules, feeling sick as the cold water splashed her stomach. In the cupboard beneath the drugs was the booze. Brand new booze. When Eddie still lived here she’d cleared it out when it became apparent he was in trouble with whisky and brandy. Now she had restocked it. Just in case. She looked in there, sighed and closed the cupboard again. Not yet.

  And then it happened. A knock at the door. Jilly froze, her eyes startled wide like the look on a young kid’s face just before a car hits him.

  She remembered that this was how it all began – the nightmare, with a knock at the door. The knock that was going to scoop her insides out and leave her barely able to stand, merely a shell with nothing good inside anymore.

  Only an hour before that knock, everything had been fine. Sammy had wandered off out the front door. “I’ll see you this afternoon, Mum.” He’d walked dejectedly down the drive, hands in pockets, NY baseball cap shading his eyes from the sun.

  “Go careful,” she’d shouted after him. He waved absently over his shoulder, didn’t look back.

  She never saw him again.

  And now, another knock brought it all back in a flood of tightly ordered memory, despite the sagging state of her twisted mind, and Jilly almost fell over in the kitchen there and then. But she clung on to the worktop until the fogginess evaporated, and only when the knock came again did she feel the urge to move towards it, like some inbred command: need to pee, go to toilet. Knock at front door, answer door.

  Eventually she made it there, swallowed hard before reaching for the catch. Her mum smiled sympathetically up at her from the doorstep, a small bunch of roses clutched to her chest and a warm, endearing smile bathed in the day’s sunlight. “Aw, Jilly…”

  The Yorkshire Echo. 19th June

  By Michael Lyndon

  Deacon’s passionate introduction for The Rules: “The criminal will pay”

  “IF YOU want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals.”

  Social networks around the world are buzzing with Sir George Deacon’s words, which will send a shiver up the spines of those who would commit crime on the United Kingdom mainland.

  Earlier today, Justice Secretary Sir George Deacon disregarded a prepared speech for the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act.

  At London’s Earl Court, Deacon mesmerised the audience as he tore into an ad lib monologue setting out his reasons why The Rules were a just – and justified – piece of legislation for the UK, despite continued pressure from home and abroad to abandon the changes.

  Deacon made a strong reference to the murders of his predecessor, Roger King, outside his Kensington home two years ago, and that of PAC founder Josephine Tower, who died a
longside eighteen children and two other adults in an arson attack on a school in Sussex at the beginning of June. He said major incidents such as these, and like that on the London Underground, which highlight easy firearms acquisition, were the catalysts for this legislation.

  For a more in-depth appraisal of Deacon, turn to page 14, where we compare his style to former great orators including Blair, Obama, Churchill, and Thatcher.

  13

  Saturday 20th June

  – One –

  The room was dark. It was quiet. The smells in here, mainly linseed oil from the cellar and the lingering odour of gas from the camping stove meal an hour ago, mixed with dampness; even in this hot June, dampness still lingered, reluctant to depart the old house. Two candles burned in the corner nearest the scabby mattress, throwing twists of smoke into the air, their radiance a flickering symbol of hope in a dreary and dangerous world. Spiders’ webs glistened in their light and swayed in the tiny updrafts of warm air.

  Christian smiled at his lot. He wasn’t rich by any means. In the eyes of the state he didn’t even exist. He had no National Insurance number, no police record, no bank account; didn’t know where his birth certificate was, if he’d ever had one. He’d never owned an ID card, fingerprint, retina or otherwise; and never had his DNA or fingerprints taken. He was Mr Nobody, as transient as the candle smoke, and as vague as its flame. It was just as he wanted it, yes, Mr Nobody.

  He looked at the bare brick walls – the dampness had pushed most of the plaster off about three years ago. The ceiling was naked too, a network of laths with only hints of the horsehair plaster that once resided between them. He looked at the rotten window frame, half the glass missing, covered by a piece of swollen chipboard. A grey net curtain, torn and snagged, fluttered against the remaining glass. A breeze squeezed through to sway the candles’ flames. No, he wasn’t rich, but he was lucky.

  He crouched by her side and looked into her face, watching as the candlelight caressed her skin. Beneath the crimson tangle of fine veins running through the yellow tarnish of her eyeballs, there was still the old Alice. And somewhere beneath the black chaos of hair falling across her spotty face, Alice lived still.

  The drugs had toyed with her for four years, but she was still in there somewhere. And sometimes, on the days when she felt good, when the drugs slackened their grip enough for her to sneak into the world they used to share, he could see her the way she was back then. That was Alice. And she would come back to him one day. He hoped.

  When they first met, she had been on coke, and that was okay; it was tolerable. But the dealers and the other junkies got to her. And now she was a junkie too.

  Beneath the candles’ light, Christian’s smile fell away and he knew it was time to provide for her. There was the stash hidden in the cellar for emergencies, but so far the need for it hadn’t materialised. And if tonight went well, he could delay that need for another week or two. He pulled the old quilt up over Alice’s shoulders. The net curtain billowed into the room and he could see moonlight, white and pale, through the gaps in the boarded-over window. It made him think of his latest project. He had time just to peek, didn’t he?

  Christian stood and crossed bare floor where the smell of linseed blew up through the cracks from the cellar below. He opened the door to the kitchen and quietly pulled it closed after him, his footfalls echoed around the bare walls, grit underfoot sounding like sandpaper on an empty pan. He turned towards the cellar door, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the lack of light. No moonlight in here, and he couldn’t even switch on his torch; he daren’t, for if the dealers found them, death would be the least of their problems.

  “Maybe later,” he said, and collected his tools and trainers as he headed for the corrugated iron sheet covering the back door. A sliver of moonlight crept through the gap between it and the wall, and further spots of moonlight beamed in through rusting nail holes, and lit up the floorboards like a private interstellar show.

  He pulled the corrugated sheet closed and studied the cobbled lane and the black wasteland beyond it, scanning for movement in the night. He saw none and headed out quickly.

  If all went according to plan, one day they wouldn’t need to live in places that were fit only for pulling down. It was not beyond hope, and the way to achieving his goal was not by using the tools in his pocket, but by using the tools in his heart and in his mind. It was near, that one day.

  – Two –

  Robin McHue whipped the covers back and sat up in bed cursing his inability to sleep. It was the meeting that did it. The important meeting he had tomorrow with that fucking pillow-biter of a boss.

  “What’s up, love?” His wife slurred the words, still half asleep.

  “Never mind.”

  He thudded across the bedroom floor, tramped down the stairs, and collided with his golf clubs stacked in a corner of the hall. Still cursing, he poured himself a large glass of whisky and sat in the dark lounge listening to the frigging clock ticking, and watching a band of moonlight creep across the carpet towards the kitchen. He dug his nails into the leather suite and grunted his anger into the silent room. That’s it, he’d had enough, and tomorrow after the meeting, he vowed to make an appointment with the doctor and get this insomnia shit sorted once and for all. It was responsible for dropping his performance at work; he’d missed three targets this year already, and the lack of sleep was as certainly to blame for it as sodomy was for his boss’s high-pitched voice.

  He sighed and then noticed the light in the kitchen. He turned his head and watched it. At first it made him jump. But as he watched through the archway he realised it was the beam of a very small torch jittering around the walls.

  Robin McHue climbed slowly to his feet and rested the glass back on the counter.

  – Three –

  He was a fair burglar. He stole from the rich – and only from the rich – to feed the poor, and he did it with no violence, if possible, and with no mess. He left behind anything sentimental, and took only cash, and maybe credit cards if they were the old ones that had a PIN number, and if that PIN was to hand.

  Forty minutes from home, on a good street up in Meanwood, he walked by a suitable target. The house was a large detached job with a double garage and two cars on the drive. He couldn’t see an alarm, and the window around the back was open!

  No need for the tools with this one. But he still changed his shoes. It was Christian’s habit. From each house he burgled, he always tried to take a pair of trainers, and he wore them at his next job, abandoning them later, keeping his own shoes for living in. It prevented the police getting a picture of his working habits through footwear identification. He was thorough, and he thought about things before he did them, like he thought about his ideals and the way he conducted his travels through life. This was all part of the big picture.

  He placed his own shoes under the hedge at the front of the house and then strolled around to the rear, getting inside the gloves as he went. He shone his small torch through the open kitchen window, scanning its corners for passive infrared sensors. There were none, and so he hauled himself silently up onto the window ledge and took a last look behind him. He put the torch away, relying on the moonlight and his night vision to get him the riches.

  He stood at the edges of the polished wooden floor, lessening the chances of it groaning, and listened to the house.

  Christian’s eyes sprang wide. He held his breath. Silently he glided forward and crouched, peering around the corner and into the door-less archway that led into the lounge. His eyes were drawn to a slat of bright moonlight lying like a neatly folded sheet on the lounge floor, spreading out and getting wider as it approached the kitchen area. A shadow spoiled the sheet. It moved slowly, and it held a golf club.

  He had a choice: He could turn and quietly clamber back out through the window with his tail between his legs or he could confront the man, and consider Alice’s needs. This was an excellent opportunity, he reminded himself. How many hou
ses of this standard did you come across, and further, how many houses of this standard did you come across with the window wide open?

  Christian approached the threshold as silently as a fog creeping over a graveyard. He looked at the elongated shadow. The golf club lifted.

  Am I brave, or am I stupid? More to the point, which is he?

  The club wavered, looked as though the guy was preparing to take his shot, waggling his big arse, adjusting his grip, waiting for the ball to show itself. Oh, yes, he was a hit first, fuck the questions, kinda guy. Christian ran the tips of his fingers over the rough stubble of his cheeks. He watched the golf club, saw the shadow fingers tighten his grip, flexing, waiting. He pulled in a long silent breath through an open mouth, considering his options.

  “Who’s there?”

  Christian blinked and held his breath. It was always the question asked by people who weren’t expecting visitors.

  The man with the golf club cleared his throat and the shadow fingers gripped tighter. “I said who’s there?”

  “I heard you the first fucking time.” Christian heard the shriek, a small surprised little thing that a squeezed diaphragm forced through a clenched mouth. “It’s me,” he said in a friendly, soothing voice, “Mr Nobody.”