Hit and Run

by Andy Maslen

  Stella looked around the courtroom. The public benches were full. The usual mixture of pensioners who fancied somewhere warm to sit for the day, the trial junkies taking notes in grubby notebooks, and, she supposed, some ordinary citizens who simply wanted to see what happened when justice was enacted in their name. Also in attendance were a fair number of journalists, including a court artist, her bony hands twitching over the paper with coloured pastels.

  The whole scene felt unreal. The barristers in their grey-white wigs and black gowns like crows; the judge in her red robe and longer version of the lawyers’ wig. And there, in the dock, hateful, verminous, smiling – Why? – was the man who’d snuffed out her husband’s life: Edwin Deacon. Cheap suit in shiny blue material. Blond hair cut short and greased into shape like a sixties barber’s model. He was cleaning under his fingernails with one canine tooth and then inspecting his handiwork.

  With a huff, a door opened against a damped closer, and the jury members trooped back in to take their seats. Stella watched closely to see whether any of them would look at her, or at Deacon. A young woman, third from the front, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, looked at Stella from under a fringe of blonde hair. Her expression was impossible to read. A sad smile that could mean, ‘we’ve brought you closure’, or ‘we’ve let you down’. When they were seated and the hubbub that accompanied any personnel change in court had subsided, aided by a sharp word from the judge, he turned to face the jury foreman. He spoke, in a crisp, upper-class voice.

  “Have you reached a verdict upon which at least ten of you agree?”

  The foreman cleared his throat, then he, too, looked at Stella.

  “Yes, My Lord.”

  “What is your verdict? Please answer only guilty or not guilty.”

  The silence was total. Jaswinder squeezed Stella’s hand. Jason’s hand was sweating against her other palm. It tightened. I wonder what he’s going to say, Stella thought. Then, What will I tell Lola when she’s old enough?

  The stocky foreman opened his mouth. He seemed to have moved into slow motion. Stella could see the jerks between the frames as the movie played out in front of her. She watched his chest inflating inside his suit jacket and shirt as he prepared to speak. Then, with an audible click inside her brain, reality snapped back into focus.

  “Guilty.”

  Sighs and gasps hissed out around her. She could hear pens scratching at the reporters’ notebooks and the oily scuffing of the sketch artist’s pastels on the paper. Her mother-in-law was weeping, and a wisp of her perfume – Chanel No. 5 – curled away from her and enveloped Stella. The judge spoke again.

  “Is that the verdict of you all or by majority?”

  “Of us all, My Lord.”

  “Thank you all. You have discharged your duty, which, as I said at the beginning of this trial, is one of the most sacred duties a citizen can perform. It is right and proper that you should feel proud of your contribution.”

  The foreman smiled at the praise, turned and nodded to the others, and sat.

  The judge looked down at Deacon, who looked, if anything, bored by the proceedings that were about to engulf him. Stella’s focus was slipping again, and the judge’s words were overlaid with a crackle of static. She closed her eyes, but that made the feeling of floating worse.

  “Edwin James Deacon, you have … guilty of causing death by careless driving. By your thoughtless actions, you … on this family … remorse … three years … and also banned from driving …”

  Stella was breathing fast, too fast, she knew. Her heart was stuttering in her chest. She heard Jaswinder from miles away asking her if she was OK. She nodded, but that made her head swim. Across the courtroom, she saw Deacon being led from the dock. As he stepped down, he looked directly at her. His face was clear and sharp against the darkening background. He smirked. Then his lips moved. What was he saying? It looked like, “You’ve been bad.”

  Then, mercifully, the curtains swung shut, and all was black.

  The months that followed passed in a haze of tranquillisers and thin-stemmed glasses of white wine. During her waking hours, one thought more than any other circled around and around inside Stella’s head: three years. Three! People got more than that for aggravated assault. With good behaviour, Deacon could be out in two. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t justice.

  Somehow, she knew she was going to get herself back to work. She was going to dig into the case files and she was going to find the evidence that would see Deacon retried for murder and put away properly. Just, not yet. A pill and a glass of the old Pinot Grigio first.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sweet and Proper

  3 NOVEMBER 2009

  THE PHOTOGRAPHS SPREAD out on the table made for disturbing viewing. In contrast to the finely figured rosewood, which smelled of freshly applied beeswax polish, the images printed on the glossy photographic paper were raw, messy and grimy. The scene was the interior of what appeared to be a cheaply built council flat. A small box of a room, no more than ten feet square, steel-framed casement window on the back wall, cheap, functional aluminium fittings on the open door.

  The lighting was over-bright: a flash aimed straight at the subject. It threw sharp-edged shadows of the few pieces of furniture onto the walls behind them. In the centre of the mud-coloured carpet lay a body. The body was female. It was dressed in a denim miniskirt, a white cap-sleeved T-shirt, through the thin, stained and ripped cotton of which could be seen a red bra, and that was all. The splayed legs revealed that she had no underwear on. The red knickers could be seen in the corner of the room, flung there, presumably, by her murderer. But the viewers’ eyes weren’t captured by the sexual aspects of the picture. That function was played by the wounds.

  Both thighs had been slit open from groin to knee. The femoral arteries had been sliced into, and her heart had pumped virtually her entire blood supply out through the obscenely gaping wounds onto the carpet. A third wound had hardly bled at all. Presumably inflicted post-mortem, the slash across her throat had almost severed her head. It lay at a ninety-degree angle to her neck, connected by a thick chunk of muscle and connective tissue at the back of the throat.

  Ignore the horror of the wounds, and what remained was a rather pretty young woman, of twenty or twenty-two. Soft, wavy, auburn hair framed a small, pointed face. The staring eyes were hazel and perfectly round, situated in perfect proportion above a small, upturned nose and a wide mouth.

  “Not guilty by reason of insanity?” one of the people staring down at the photographs said.

  “He had that clever bitch at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Chambers defending him. The new QC. Marion Clarke,” a second person said.

  “She’s the one who got the Hounslow Rapist off last year, isn’t she?” The second speaker pushed the photos around on the polished rosewood, pursing his thin, pale-pink lips at each new angle of the horror.

  “Yes. Fancies herself quite the psychologist. And she’s a demon with expert witnesses,” the first speaker said. “Had our shrink on the ropes in thirty seconds.”

  “We’ll talk about Marion Clarke QC at another meeting,” said a third speaker. “For now, what are we going to do about Nigel Golding? Did you see his face when they took him off to the loony bin? Smile as wide as you like. Evil little shit knows he’ll be out on the streets in a year or so. ‘Oh, yes, Madam Headshrinker,’” he adopted a singsong voice, “‘I feel so much better now. The voices telling me to butcher my girlfriend have all gone clean away.’”

  The third speaker brought the glossy eight-by-tens together into a pile and knocked them edge-on to the table, squaring them up into a neat stack before placing them to one side of his notebook. He looked up at the other two men.

  “Call Mark Hollingsworth at SCO19. We’ll need a team of his firearms chaps and an armed response vehicle.”

  The following day, at eight thirty in the morning, the Right Honourable Nigel Golding, Seventeenth Earl of Broome and Gresham, was being transferred to an armoured v
an from a holding cell beneath the Central Criminal Court on Old Bailey, the street that had given the court its popular name.

  He’d avoided prison, as do all offenders deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. In fairness to his lawyer, the insanity idea had been all his own. From the moment he’d been arrested, after being found drenched in blood and out of his head on crystal meth and high-grade Dutch skunk in his eighteen-and-a-half-million-pound penthouse apartment in Mayfair, he’d begun to play the role of a paranoid schizophrenic.

  “They told me to do it!” he’d screamed at the arresting officers. “Uriel, Jegudiel, Barachiel: the archangels. They gave me orders. To stop him using the body of a human woman. She was Satan. I saw the red lights behind her eyes.”

  Then he’d sprung at the female detective, clawing at her face and earning himself a swift and brutal clout from her uniformed male colleague’s extendible baton. The journey to Paddington Green Police Station had passed for him in a hazy nightmare of grinning clowns and talking Labrador puppies.

  Throughout the booking procedure in the custody suite, the many interviews, the conversations with his solicitor, and his brief, Golding had maintained the shrieking persona he’d adopted: “Crazy Nige,” as he’d mentally dubbed himself.

  With time to kill awaiting his trial, bail having been denied, he refined and expanded his delusional narrative. The archangels were a masterstroke, he felt, but too commonplace. Waking at three one morning, he’d had a brainwave. Celebrities! Or, more specifically, a single celebrity. Rebecca Purefoy, the British actress as famous for her sex tapes and drunken selfies as her roles in a blockbuster female serial killer film.

  “She told me!” he hissed at his lawyer, dotting her palely dusted cheeks with frothy little bubbles of saliva. “She wants to marry me. But she’s under attack from Satan. He was using Francesca to get to Rebecca. ‘Kill the vessel, kill the possessor,’ that’s what Becky told me. She loves me, you see. She always has. But she needs to be safe.”

  His performance in court was as flawless as his lawyer’s complexion. Under her gentle questioning, and the rather more aggressive line of interrogation from the QC representing the Crown, he stuck to his script. At one point, he turned to the judge and began growling and gabbling in a low, guttural tone he’d seen used in a late-night rerun of The Exorcist.

  He was smiling to himself as the private guards working for the prison security contractor escorted him up from the basement cells through a tunnel to the reasonably clean and reasonably fresh air at street level on Warwick Lane. He was looking forward to kicking back at some leafy sanatorium for the criminally insane. A bit of occupational therapy, group chest-beating with half a dozen losers with more tats than teeth, daily therapy sessions with some well-meaning cunt in a cheap suit and blood-coloured lipstick. And then, in the fullness of time, release. Or escape.

  The Right Honourable Nigel had long known the true condition that infected his soul. He suspected his father and mother had too. Hence the strict military boarding school, isolated from the rest of the world by hundreds of square miles of bleak Scottish moorland. Hence the constant observation by an ex-British marine commando they had hired as his “valet.” Hence their willingness to indulge him in solo rifle-hunting trips out onto the mountains. Where he could kill, butcher and consume whatever four-legged mammals he could bring down.

  “I’m your basic, common-or-garden psychopath,” he’d confided to a slaughtered stag one crisp autumn morning, as he’d squatted beside its gutted torso, munching contentedly on its heart and watching the steam rising from the pile of hot, stinking, silvery-purple guts beside him.

  Outside, a waxy, yellow, November sun was shining. It warmed the skin but not the air, which was as crisp and still as it had been when he field-dressed the stag. Golding lifted his face to the crystalline blue sky and stretched his lips wide in a grin.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked the guards. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” He pointed up with his cuffed hands.

  “Shut up, you,” the taller of the two men said in a low growl, yanking his prisoner’s arms down again. “You should be going to Pentonville for what you done to that lass, or better yet, a fucking deep hole in the ground.”

  Golding shrugged as the other guard unlocked the rear doors of the white armoured van and thrust a hand in the small of his back so he stumbled as he climbed in, jarring his shin painfully against the raised steel lip of the passenger compartment.

  Waiting inside was an armed police officer. Stocky, maybe five-feet-seven or -eight, shaved head, dark eyes, scowl. He wore the full tactical outfit of the Met’s firearms squad. Black trousers with reinforced knees and thighs, black shirt under a heavyweight nylon windcheater. And even a Pro-Tec tactical helmet. On his right hip was a black nylon holster, protruding from which was the black plastic grip of a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol.

  “What’s this?” Golding brayed in his drug-roughened upper-class drawl. “You’ve laid on a SWAT team just to get poor, mad little Nigel to hospital? How sweet of you. Now then, action man, shift along, would you?”

  He sat down on the riveted steel bench next to the firearms officer and watched carefully as the two rent-a-cops took up positions on the facing bench. They glared at him. He smiled back. He was imagining what they’d look like with their heads in their laps.

  With a rumble and a throaty clatter from its engine, the truck moved away from the rear entrance to the Central Criminal Court.

  Golding nudged the firearms officer in the right bicep. “Is that real?” he asked, nodding towards the Glock.

  The man stared at him for a second, face muscles slack, then returned to his eyes-front pose, placing his right palm ostentatiously on the butt of the pistol.

  Golding looked across at the guards and rolled his eyes. He tutted. “I think guns killed the art of conversation, don’t you?”

  Then he smashed his left elbow into the armed cop’s face, bringing forth a scream and two jets of blood from his nose. At the same time, he reached down and yanked the Glock free of the holster, the handcuffs forcing him to use a two-handed grip he was familiar with from TV. He delivered a blow with the barrel across the man’s right temple. As he toppled off the bench, Golding stood, levelling the pistol at the two guards. Typical private sector: they’d frozen. One had a dark patch spreading on the crotch of his navy uniform trousers.

  “You!” he shouted at the man on the left. “What’s the signal to stop the van?”

  “It’s a radio code.”

  “Well, give it, then. Or do you want me to shoot you in the face with this?” He gestured with the Glock. “And unlock these. Now!” he shouted, pushing his hands out at the guard.

  The man shook his head violently from side to side and pulled his radio from his belt. He squinted down at it and pressed a button on the face. Some sort of emergency code generator. Seconds later, the truck screeched to a halt, throwing the two guards forward as the brakes bit. Golding had braced himself and stood above them, grinning down at the man fumbling with the handcuff keys.

  “Stay there. If you move, you die.”

  Both men chose to obey. Not paid enough for heroics, was Golding’s judgement.

  Then the lock on the rear doors scraped, and a moment after that, the left-hand door swung open. As it did, Golding leaned back and kicked at it, doubling its speed, producing a sharp, wounded cry from the other side. As he jumped down, he saw a third uniformed guard sprawled on his back, hand clamped to his face, blood running freely through the clenching fingers.

  With a laugh, Golding turned and sprinted away from the van.

  He had run a total of ten feet before a shout stopped him.

  “Armed police! Stop! Put the gun down! Armed police!”

  He whirled round, Glock still in his hand, and pulled the trigger as he pointed it at one of the five black-clad firearms officers standing in a widely spaced semi-circle in the middle of the road.

  The Glock clicked once, a sharp, metallic scrape.
It was empty.

  The Heckler & Koch MP5 carbines aimed at his head and chest by the police officers were not.

  All five officers opened fire at once. The noise of the 9mm rounds exploding from the muzzles deafened Golding. But only for a moment. Then his auditory function shut down, along with all other vital signs, as the bullets found their target. With copper-jacketed rounds tearing into him, he spun and fell in a bloodied heap, the Glock still clenched in an outflung hand.

  The disarmed SCO19 officer stepped down from the rear of the truck, a blood-splotched handkerchief clutched to his nose. He managed a grim smile. He picked up the Glock, extracted a magazine from his belt and slotted it home into the grip with a solid click. Then he holstered the pistol and went to join his colleagues, who were lowering their MP5s, moving the selector switches to safe, and slinging them over their backs.

  “All right, Tom?” the sergeant commanding the armed response team asked.

  “Tip top. One less on the to-do list, eh?”

  The sergeant laughed. “Yeah. One down, all the rest to go.”

  Later, after swiping his ID card to check in his weapons at the armoury, the sergeant called a number on his phone. The name by the number simply said, P.

  “Sergeant,” the voice at the other end said, “how did it go today?”